


In storms and at sunset

by jouissant



Series: What things we have heard together [3]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Established Relationship, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Canon, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 20:35:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7189208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In February Dick saw crocuses peeking out of the weedy dirt in the side yard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In storms and at sunset

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe it took me this long to write this, my god. 
> 
> Thanks to semperama for spitballing and general support! 
> 
> Third in a series of pretentious and tangentially-related Frank O'Hara titles, this one from "To the Harbormaster."

In February Dick saw crocuses peeking out of the weedy dirt in the side yard. 

He was coming back from church and he’d stopped to scrape the mud from his boots on the front steps when he caught sight of them, their minty spears pushing up through the loam. He went around the side of the house to investigate. There had been a bed here once; there was a flimsy wirework border set in and the dirt was mounded up, but it had been long left fallow and was hairy with dead grass. He dug around one of the stems with his toe and kicked a rock or two away, knelt and gathered a handful of grey, cold dirt. Something on the ground caught his eye. He reached down and picked it up: a button, pale and pearly where it wasn’t crusted with mud he scraped off with a fingernail. It was oversized, chunky, meant for small and clumsy fingers. He held it in his outstretched palm and looked at it a moment, and he was still there squatting in the forgotten bed when Nix came out of the house and let the screen slam shut behind him. 

“I thought it was warming up,” Nix said by way of greeting. “It’s still fucking freezing. What are you doing?” 

Dick stood and slid the button into his pocket. “Nothing much,” he said. “Was there a garden here?” 

Nix shrugged. He was wearing a dark green sweater with patches at the elbows. He lit a cigarette and squinted at Dick. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “I don’t really remember.” 

“You sleep okay?” 

Nix nodded. “You didn’t.”

Dick ran a hand back through his hair. “Last night wasn’t so bad,” he said. “I think I made it to about four. Did I wake you, moving around?” 

Nix shook his head. “I went back to sleep,” he said. And had stayed that way for a good long while judging by the creases on his cheek, the mussed hair, the overall look of something recently out of hibernation. That was Nix, though; he could sleep through an artillery barrage. You’d have thought a foxhole was a featherbed. 

“Must be nice,” Dick said. 

“Well, it’s Sunday,” Nix said. “Every opportunity for a catnap later.” He stretched. “You hungry?” 

“Yeah,” Dick said. “They were having a potluck after the service. I was tempted.” 

“You should’ve stayed. I can fend for myself. I know how to crack eggs.” 

“And that’s about it,” Dick said, neatly dodging the clod of dirt Nix kicked at his shins. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go inside and you can whip me up the house specialty again. I’ll just have to keep longing for the day you decide to tackle pancakes.” 

“I told you, I’m building to it.” 

There was no one on the street, so Dick let his hand rest on Nix’s shoulder as they walked back into the house together. 

It was afternoon by now, but Dick made a pot of coffee and sat at the kitchen table to sip at a cup. He watched Nix’s back as he stood over the counter, the slope of his shoulders soft beneath the sweater. He cocked his head this way and that as he fiddled with the pan. Thin sunlight came streaming in through the kitchen window and lit on the mop of Nix’s hair. Dick could get caught up looking at that hair, liked to mess it all up between his fingers, which only made Nix toss his head and pull away. What’re you fussing for, he’d say. It’s nothing much. 

Nix cast a look back over his shoulder now as if he could sense Dick looking. “Make yourself useful and stick some toast in, would you?” 

“Hey,” Dick said. “Some of us have been up since the wee hours.” 

“Yeah, yeah. You know, I’m not sure why anyone ever thought a benevolent God would schedule anything first thing on a Sunday morning.” 

“You’re Catholic,” Dick said. “What do you know about a benevolent God?” 

“Exactly. Now hop on that toast, Major, or we’ll be having a two-course lunch.” 

Dick snorted, getting up from his chair. “Fancy. Regular Waldorf Astoria you’ve got going here, Lew.” 

“No kidding. And my rates are criminally low. Nonexistent, even. Why, I’ve got all kinds of freeloaders--ow! Quit, Goddammit, you’ll make me burn my eggs.” 

Dick had made a stopover on his way to the toaster. “Tell me more about these freeloaders,” he muttered alongside Nix’s lips. “Sounds like a real problem.” 

“Mm. Like you wouldn’t believe.” 

In the end they ate the eggs cold, piled up on a piece of toast each, but they’d both had worse by far. If there was one thing the war taught Dick it was that circumstances could always be worse, and anyway, he’d far rather sit at the round kitchen table with Nix drinking coffee and eating cold eggs than do much of anything else. Those were the facts, and Dick didn’t spend a lot of time or energy second-guessing them. 

“Speaking of freeloading,” he started, “Now I’m set up at work I want to start giving you something every month. I’ve been looking at rooms to let--” 

“Dick--” 

“--and I think I’ve found the going rate. So--” 

“You’re not paying me rent,” Nix said. “You were never supposed to be my boarder, for Christ’s sake.” 

“Don’t call it rent, then. Call it...I don’t know. A contribution.” 

“Well, I appreciate it, but it’s not necessary.” 

Dick chased the last of the eggs around the plate with his fork. “You don’t appreciate it,” he said, without looking at Nix. “That’s the truth, isn’t it.” 

Nix sighed. “I didn’t ask you here to defray my expenses,” he said. “And you’ve never brought up money before, so why you’re starting now is beyond me.” 

“Lew, this isn’t a round of drinks or a hotel room. You’re putting me up long term. I ought to at least kick in.” 

“You kick in,” Nix said. “This place is spotless, for a start. You buy groceries.” 

“When you let me,” Dick said. “You need to let me more often.” 

Half the time food just seemed to appear in the larder or the icebox, the same way the house was sometimes decidedly more spic-and-span in the afternoon than when they left in the morning. There was a woman, Dick knew, who came in and cleaned, who did the shopping some days. He didn’t much like it; the thought of anyone cleaning up after him made him profoundly uncomfortable. He made both beds every morning and tried to leave the big bedroom looking as if only one man slept there. 

“She’s worked for the family for years,” Nix had said when he asked. “Can’t exactly let her go now, can we?” 

At the table now Nix waved a hand. He was careless in the way all men from money were careless, safe in the knowledge they’d always been taken care of and always would be. Nix was so far removed from the notion of any kind of lack that Dick was inclined to believe his assurance innate, beyond conscious thought, and his utter bemusement at Dick’s desire to chip in seemed to bear that out. For who wouldn’t want to be taken care of, if he had the chance? Nix _had_ and Dick _hadn’t_ , and so Nix running the show was the natural order of things. 

He’s your friend, Dick thought. It’s what he knows. 

“It’s only that I appreciate the hospitality,” Dick said, trying a different tack. “This was...it was more than I could have hoped for, coming back. I hope you know that.” 

“I’d have offered no matter what,” Nix said in a rush. “Regardless of--” He gestured between them. 

“Maybe you would. Maybe you wouldn’t,” Dick said. “It’s all right. I’m here now, aren’t I?” 

“Well, I would have. But I guess you’re right. It doesn’t matter now.” 

It matters, Dick wanted to say. Instead he stood and picked up his plate. “You finished?” he asked Nix, and when he nodded yes Dick took his too. “I was thinking,” Dick said as he scraped their crusts into the garbage. “Would you have any objection to turning that side yard back into a garden?” 

“Huh? Oh, no,” Nix said. “What would you grow there?” 

He sounded half interested at best, his mind already racing along to the rest of the day. Nix lolled around on Sundays. Some weeks he went into the city and met Blanche and his father for dinner. If this week was one of those he’d be dreading it already. 

“Hadn’t figured it out yet,” Dick said. “Tomatoes. Corn, maybe.” 

“Corn?” 

“Just a little. Anyway, it’d take some work. I thought I might get a start on it today, depending.” 

“Depending on what?” 

“On what you’re doing.” 

“Oh,” Nix said. “I don’t know. I’ll read, I guess. Stanhope’s expecting me for six-thirty.” 

“So it’s one of those Sundays,” Dick said. “My condolences.” 

Nix made a face. “Thanks.” 

“Well, I’ll do it some other time, then,” Dick said. “Shops are closed, anyway, if I need supplies.” 

“There’s that shed around back,” Nix said. “I’ve got no idea what the fuck is back there, but you’re welcome to whatever you can find. A garden, though? Really?” 

Dick shrugged. “I--” 

“Like the thought of it?” 

There was the lilt of a tease there, a wry half smile, and Dick decided that whatever funk Nix had gotten into over the notion of Dick’s room and board must be beginning to lift. He ran some water over the plates to get the crumbs off and set them in the sink to be dealt with later. The oversight rankled, but only partly, and in this way he figured Nix was already beginning to rub off on him. 

Nix had gotten up from the table. The plates would keep.

***

Later in the afternoon they lay on top of the quilt together. Dick had his head on Nix’s chest, and Nix had his fingers in Dick’s hair. From his vantage point Dick could see a gunmetal square of sky out the window, veined with tree branches. He thought the light was beginning to go already. 

“Looks like it might snow again,” he said. 

“Yeah, maybe. You cold?” 

“A little.” 

Nix sat up, reached out for the corner of the quilt and flipped it over both of them. He curled around Dick and slung his arm over his shoulder. “Better?” 

“Thanks.” 

They lay quietly for a long time, Dick beginning to drift and blinking himself awake again.  
He thought it was particularly cruel that his restlessness should trouble him only at night. He could drowse the day away without a care in the world, but let him try to pass the night unmolested and without fail he’d come awake from some dream or other as completely as if he’d never slept at all. When it happened he’d toss and turn as much as he dared without waking Nix, and finally he’d admit defeat and get up, go into the study with its blue rabbit wallpaper and write letters or stare at a book until the sky began to lighten.

“Don’t let me sleep,” he said to Nix. “I’ll never get to bed later if I do.” 

From the boneless drape of his body Nix was nearly there himself. “Not even a little while?” he murmured. “Twenty minutes.” _Twenny minutes,_ it came out, the slur of an overtired child. 

“Lew,” Dick said, and shifted so they were both a little less comfortable. 

Nix growled at him and rolled over onto his back, scrubbed at his face. “Hell,” he said. “I guess I’m due off in an hour or so.” 

“We don’t have to get up,” Dick said, and Nix snorted, because that was more self-indulgent than Dick was given to allowing of himself. “We don’t,” he said. “I like lying here with you. Just--let’s talk. Talk to me.” 

“What about?” 

“Doesn’t matter.” 

Nix sighed. Dick’s head rose up on his chest as on the swell of a wave and sank back down again. “Okay,” Nix said finally. “I’ve got a question for you.” 

Dick swallowed. He got the idea the action was warranted. 

 

“You ever feel bad about it?” Nix asked. 

“About what?” 

“You know.” He laughed uneasily. “Man lying with man and all that.” 

“I’m lying with you right now, Lew. Just said I liked it.”

“You know what I mean.” 

“I do.” 

“You’re going to tell me you’re all right with it?” 

Dick considered a moment. Nix’s fingernails pricked at his scalp. “First things first,” he said. “I’ve killed men. I’ll have to square that with God one way or another.” 

“And you don’t think He’d have something to say about this?” 

Dick sat up. “Does it seem equivalent to you? Anyway, I’m not...I’m not sure what you want me to say.” 

“I don’t want you to say anything,” Nix said. “I’m just playing devil’s advocate.” 

“Well, don’t.” 

He drew the covers back and threw his legs over the side of the bed. Nix made a displeased noise, presumably at the loss of Dick, or the intrusion of cold air, or both. Dick didn’t care. There were moments when he thought Nix acted like a petulant child, and there were moments when all of this began to seem like a test, and Dick had little tolerance for either scenario. 

“I thought you wanted to talk,” Nix said. 

“Poor choice of topic.” 

He slid his shorts back on and cast about for his trousers, pulled a sweater on over his head. He could feel the oppressiveness of Sunday pushing into the four corners of the room. Nix bristled to match, dropping back onto the mattress and rolling onto his stomach, tugging the quilt up around his ears. Dick crossed his arms over his waist and stared at him awhile, and then he put his slippers on and went into the other room and sat and stared at a book until it was so late and Nix so ensconced that he felt obliged to go and tell him he was nearly overdue in the city. 

Nix cursed and sat up and fumbled for the lamp. Dick leaned over and turned it on and sat beside him on the bed. Maybe it was the glum look on Nix’s face; maybe it was the knowledge of how much he disliked what he was about to go and do. Either way, Dick felt inclined towards reconciliation. He laid his hand on the lump of Nix’s thigh under the blanket. Nix looked down and Dick ducked his head to try and catch his eye. 

“Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t apologize,” Nix said. “You’re right. It was a lousy choice of topic. If that’s my idea of pillow talk, I ought to just give up right now.” 

“Can I tell you something?” 

“Sure,” Nix said. 

Dick looked at his watch and made a face. “Better not, on second thought,” he said. “You’ll be late for dinner.” 

Nix bit his lip. “Hell, I can miss it. Come here.” 

“Nix--” 

“I said, come here. They’ll live without me for once.” 

“I don’t want to be responsible for--” 

“Well, you are. Better get used to it.” He patted the bed next to him. “Come on.” 

Dick sighed, kicked off his slippers and crawled back into the bed. The space alongside Nix was still warm. Nix was like a hearth fire when he slept. Dick was still getting accustomed to it every night, to having a place to sleep that was a bed, that was a bed this big, that was a bed co-occupied by his friend Lewis Nixon, who sometimes slung a leg over him in the night and who made Dick sweat and slobbered on his pillow and kissed him idly at odd hours. 

“I do like it,” he said. “Lying with you.” 

“Literally, or...?” 

Dick dug his elbow into Nix’s side. He settled against the pillows and stared up at the ceiling, which was easier somehow than looking Nix in the face. “On the boat back,” he said, “I saw a couple of guys.” 

“Yeah?” 

“I was just walking,” Dick said. “I started feeling sick down below, so I went up on deck for some air and on the way back down I walked through belowdecks where the enlisted men were barracked. Just to see, I guess. I cut through and found a stairwell, and there was this little corridor all tucked away, and they’d stolen off there and I walked up on them.” 

“What were they doing?” Nix asked. Dick might’ve expected he’d be salacious about it, but his tone now was quiet, thoughtful almost, and that made Dick feel better. 

“Nothing much,” he replied. “But enough, all the same. Enough to know exactly what they meant to do.” 

“What did you do?” 

“Well, one of them took off first thing. The poor kid that was left--Lew, you should’ve seen him look at me. He thought he’d had it. You could see it all over his face.”

Nix winced. “So what’d you say?” 

“I told him to be more careful,” Dick said. 

“You did not.” 

“I did. What else was I supposed to say? I should’ve hauled him in front of the nearest MP, but...” 

“But what?” 

“But I couldn’t,” Dick said. “I couldn’t do it. I’d been thinking about you all night. I was thinking about you when I saw them.” 

Nix rolled onto his side, mouth soaking a warm O onto Dick’s shoulder. He was bare-chested, heavy-lidded; there could have been another joke in the offing but the air was electric in a different way than it had been down in the kitchen. 

Nix had an odd look on his face now. When he opened his mouth Dick was certain of what he’d say, that he’d duck his head and ask what do I matter? Dick didn’t know how to answer that right, without it being either too much or somehow insufficient to quell whatever darkness moved so restively behind his friend’s eyes. Better not to say anything, then; better just to get his fingers either side of Nix’s chin and tilt his face up to kiss. 

Dick wasn’t fluent in deflection, not yet. But he was learning.

***

Monday morning Dick woke up at a quarter to four. He went into the guest room and dressed, unmade the bed and made it again. He still hadn’t worked out the cleaning lady’s schedule. He hadn’t worked out Nix’s either, but it didn’t start at four in the morning under any circumstances, so Dick looked in on the long hillock of Nix’s body in their bedroom and then went down to the kitchen and put the coffee on. 

A dream clung to him, had its fingers buried in his brain. He was cold. He’d been cold in the dream, had been cold all night and huddled into Nix to stave it off and so his mind had run away with it and taken him back there. Black trees and black blood on the snow like pine tar. The coffee was ready, same color. 

Get yourself together, Dick thought. 

He sat at the kitchen table and looked out the window over the sink. He had a book in front of him, and when the paper boy tossed the morning edition onto the front porch with a whack he’d have that too, but the truth was he’d open one or the other and get through a sentence or two before he gave up and lost himself in thought again. You’d think you’d get a lot done, not sleeping, he’d said to Nix once. Nix had just looked at him evenly, dark brows knitted. 

When the sun got high enough to make walking less of a hazard he’d get his coat on and go out into the morning. He walked to work most days; sometimes Nix would pass him on the way, lay on the horn or glide up alongside and try and coax him into the car. Sometimes it worked, if it was cold enough or if Dick wanted an extra five minutes next to Nix in the car, to sit in silence and let him grouse companionably about the day ahead. 

Dick’s office was up a flight of stairs and looked out over the work floor. There was something he didn’t much like about that, not that he’d had the choice. Nor did he like the idea of having his back to the landing outside, so the first day he moved the desk so he wasn’t staring out over the factory, but sat in parallel to the assembly lines. He felt better that way, as if he were working along in tandem with everyone else, even if he was mainly shuffling papers around the way Nix had razzed him about back in Europe. Nix’s office was in an adjoining building, which Nix had seemed apologetic about the day he gave Dick the tour. 

“I’m moving into Dad’s office,” he said. “If it were up to me-- ” 

“Lew,” Dick said, squeezing Nix’s shoulder. “It’s fine.” 

He’d first seen the place late on a Saturday, no one to be found but an ancient security guard making his lazy rounds. Dick thought if anyone wished the nitration works ill they wouldn’t have much of a challenge before them, but he got the impression the man was part of the same legacy as the woman who came and cleaned, stood at the sink and dried chapped hands on her apron with grey hair tucked up into a kerchief.

He stood at that sink now himself and rinsed out his coffee cup. He poured the rest of the pot into a thermos to take with him on the walk. Nix had a secretary who seemed to take great pride in her coffee, though according to Nix she’d heated and reheated the same batch since before Pearl Harbor, so Dick had taken to bringing his own in the interest of safety. He set the thermos on the kitchen table and went to the foot of the stairs, cocked his head and looked up, straining for any hint that Nix had stirred. Hearing none, he checked his watch and sighed, then took the steps two at a time back up to the bedroom. 

He wasn’t Nix’s keeper, and if Nix wasn’t up for work it was nobody’s concern but his own. But this morning, Dick reasoned, he’d go and wake him. If he was honest, he still felt raw around the edges. The early hour, maybe, or the way they’d left his story last night. 

In the bedroom he drew the covers back from around Nix’s face and sat there staring. He wanted to touch him, but he wasn’t sure quite where to put his hands. Eventually he settled for an insistent pat on the shoulder, shaking Nix awake, and as he groaned and huffed indignantly into the pillow Dick felt a stab of disappointment at himself he was unable to fully qualify. 

“What time is it?” Nix said. 

“Almost seven.” 

“I was getting up.” Nix pressed his face to the mattress, like the light was too much, or Dick’s face was. 

Dick clapped Nix on the waist. “Sure you were,” he said. “Anyway, I’m going in a minute. I just wanted to say goodbye.” 

Nix rolled over and squinted up at him. “Stay awhile. C’mon, I’ll drive you.” 

“I like the walk. I’ll see you later, though,” Dick said. “Ten o’clock.” 

“What’s at ten?” 

“That interview, remember?” 

“Oh,” Nix said, sounding bleary. “Right, the new…new...”

“Foreman,” Dick supplied. 

“Foreman, exactly. You like the looks of the guy?” 

“Haven’t met him yet,” Dick said. “Besides, what can you tell on paper, anyway?” 

“I guess,” said Nix. “Well, I’m sure you’ll steer me right. You haven’t been wrong yet.” He stretched the length of the bed, crossed his arms behind his head. He didn’t look especially ready to mobilize. 

“It’s only been two months, Lew.” 

“I know I haven’t always got the best judgement, but I know a good thing when I see it,” Nix said. “So give yourself a little credit.” 

Dick grunted unequivocally and ran his fingers back through his hair. He got up from the bed and caught sight of his reflection in the mirror as he did so. Three months out of the service and the sight of himself in a regular old suit and tie was still jarring. 

“Dick, wait up,” Nix said from the bed. “I won’t be a minute.” 

And that seemed important somehow--something about Nix’s expression when Dick looked at his reflection in the mirror, the same thing that had stirred on his face last night. Dick couldn’t place it. The look troubled him, but not enough to press. Anyway, he liked Nix more than he liked the walk. 

“I made coffee,” Dick said. “I’ll pour you a thermos.” 

“Good man,” Nix said, extricating himself from the bed. 

He made Nix a couple of pieces of toast too, buttered them and shoved them at him wrapped in a napkin on their way out the door. Nix thanked him somewhat bashfully, and when they got into the car he balanced them on one thigh until Dick feared enough for both Nix’s trousers and the car’s interior to hold onto them himself. 

“Thanks,” Nix said a second time. “God, I hate Mondays. Say what you want to about the army, but no day was ever really a Monday.”

“Wasn’t ever really a Sunday, either,” Dick said. 

As they pulled out into the street he had his eyes on the side yard. He thought of the button he’d taken out of his pocket and set on the top of the bedroom dresser. He’d see to that this week, go through the back shed and see what Nix had stashed there and forgotten about.

***

They met at ten o’clock in Dick’s office, Dick and Nix and their prospective foreman, a man older than both of them who wrung his hat in his hands for the entirety of the interview. Dick didn’t much like taking a front-row seat to a person’s discomfort, and to find himself the direct cause was even worse. He wanted to apologize for the whole ordeal, but he couldn’t. So he leaned forward, peered at his pad of paper and asked the same interview questions he’d been asking, the ones his predecessor said they usually asked, the ones Dick stuck to out of habit.

“My weaknesses? Well. Let’s see,” the man said, biting his lip and twisting his hat in such a knot he was like to bend it permanently out of shape. He looked around the room, over Dick’s shoulder, over Nix’s. Anywhere but at them, his gaze skating this way and that like a dragonfly veers over water.

Dick couldn’t take it any longer. “Hold up a minute,” he said. From across the desk Nix shot him a curious look. Dick took the pad and flipped it face down on the desktop. “Why don’t we take a break from--from this. Why don’t you just...tell me a little about yourself.” 

“What, anything?” 

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dick said. “What’d you do in the war?” 

He regretted the question right away; after all, suppose something terrible had happened, and when you looked at it statistically the odds weren’t all that long that something terrible had. But a funny thing happened then: the man paused, looked down at his hat. Then he began talking, about how he’d joined up, worked in an Army machine shop making parts for tanks. Run the whole deal for a year or so til they’d packed his unit up and sent them over the ocean to do the same thing, only for the Army Air Force this time, how he’d stood on balmy runways and watched his handiwork roar overhead, imagined them loosing bomb after bomb on Tokyo to the east. 

Through it all Nix just watched, chin in hand, and it wasn’t until they were all getting up from their chairs that he spoke again. “We’ll be in touch,” he said. “Won’t be more than a couple of days.” 

The man thanked them both profusely, pumped their hands, clasped Dick’s for a beat and told him what a pleasure it had been. 

“Well?” Dick asked him, when the man had wandered out of the room to be seen off by Nix’s secretary. 

“Well, what?” Nix said back. “You’re the boss. What do you think?” 

“You know, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you’re the boss,” Dick said. “It’s your call.” 

Nix shrugged. “What if I’m deferring?” 

“Look, Nix--” 

“You know your business,” Nix said. “And I trust you. So if you say he’s the guy--” 

“I think he’s a candidate,” Dick said. “And I think we should finish the rest of the interviews.” 

“Good,” Nix said. “Great. So we’ll finish the rest of the interviews.” 

He shoved his hands in his pockets, head bobbing like a robin’s as he shuffled out of the room. Dick sat there for a long time, staring after him and wondering what exactly it was that he was feeling. The gray splash against his insides, the shipwreck lurch of foreboding. 

***

“I had a thought,” Dick said at dinner. 

“Stop the presses,” said Nix. Dick threw an oyster cracker at him. 

They’d gone to the diner, which had largely soothed Dick’s earlier sense of disquiet. He was eating soup again, spooning up rounds of carrots and lima beans and little pieces of noodle in alphabet shapes, covered over with a crust of the aforementioned crackers. Nix was eating a piece of pie, which Dick was trying his darnedest not to be charmed by. 

“Your thought?” Nix asked, raising an eyebrow. “Or has it come and gone?” 

Dick shut one eye, cocked his head to one side and held up another cracker as if taking aim. From behind Nix the waitress gave him a withering look, and he dropped his hand like he’d gotten an order.

Nix glanced back and saw her looking. “Sorry,” he called. “He’s a real handful.”

“You are,” he said to Dick, and the look he gave him made him thankful Nix had turned back to face him across the booth. He buried his nose in his coffee cup. 

“For the last damn time,” Nix said, laughing. “What’d you think?” 

“I _thought_ this weekend we might go into the city,” Dick said. “Find a nightclub, hear some music. Dance. We could take your sister.” 

Nix set his fork down, slid his pie plate away. “Did someone hit you over the head today? You hate that stuff.” 

“I don’t hate it,” Dick said. “And you like it. So I think we should go.” 

Nix looked skeptical. Dick shrugged. 

“It’s something to do,” he said, and Nix could look skeptical all he liked, but he couldn’t argue with that. 

The week went by apace. They interviewed three more people for the foreman position. Every time Nix let Dick run the show, and every time he seemed detached, wandered out of Dick’s office making vague noises about Dick’s relative expertise. He supposed it was nice to be trusted, but truth be told it left him wondering what precisely Nix did in his office all day. Soon enough, though, it was Friday, and getting on for five o’clock. Nix deposited himself in Dick’s office by four, perching on a chair in the corner and staring pointedly until Dick gave up on the stack of timesheets he was going through. 

“Ready to go, I guess?” 

“Oh, you know. Whenever you’re finished. Don’t hurry on my account.” 

Dick slid his paperwork aside and stretched his arms out over the breadth of the desk. “I think I’ve got to a stopping point. Might come back in tomorrow and finish up.” 

Nix made a face. “Not if I can help it,” he said. “Blanche found us a spot for tonight, if you’re still gunning to go out on the town.” 

“Tonight? She can’t make it tomorrow?” 

“Nah, she’s got plans. A date, sounds like, though I didn’t exactly press.” 

“No, I guess you wouldn’t.” 

To hear Nix tell it, Blanche had been tight-lipped on the subject of her love life. “She always was,” Nix told him once. “I didn’t know about old Harris from Yale til he died, for Christ’s sake, and that was only through Mom.”

He sounded a little sore about it, and it made Dick wonder about the two of them, Nix and his sister. They’d been close once. They must have been; they had that way around one another, as if they kept forgetting things had changed. 

That night they took the train into the city and met Blanche in front of her building. She was waiting for them, smoking a cigarette, wrapped in a black fur coat that was glossy like her hair. Dick didn’t know what to make of her. Nix pecked her on the cheek and then they set off walking, Nix griping about how they should’ve brought the car. 

“Well, if we bring the car we’ve got to park the car, haven’t we, Lewis?” Blanche said, with the strained patience of one retreading an ancient argument. 

“I hate the train,” Nix said. 

“You’ve got to get over this ridiculous grudge of yours,” she said. “Dick, what has he got against the subway?” 

“I couldn’t tell you,” Dick said.

He felt quieter around her. He was quiet by nature, of course, so he might be that way in any trio, but Blanche took up space enough for both of them. That was striking in a woman, Dick thought, and not at all unwelcome. Better to step back, put his hands in his pockets and let her and Nix go at it. It was entertaining, if nothing else, and helped alleviate the off chance that he’d say something to Nix he might regret in company. 

“So where are we going?” Nix asked. “Tell me it’s not another balloon night at the Stork Club.” 

“Hardly,” said Blanche. “Oh god, do you remember the time Lillian Astor broke a heel in the middle of the ballroom? She went down like a stone. I thought she was going to be trampled.” 

They laughed, and Dick smiled uneasily in the manner of someone who has no idea what his companions are talking about. 

“Anyway, let’s go uptown,” Blanche continued. “There’s a place I know; the crowd’s a little more relaxed.” 

“Relaxed” meant something different to Blanche than it did to most people. Dick realized that the moment they walked in the door, for the room was dark and close and packed. Blanche swept off her mink coat and stowed it in the cloakroom. The dress she wore underneath shone like a bird’s wing and was as rich looking as the coat had been. A string of pearls hung around her neck. Through it all there was a wildness, a slightly unravelled quality he had begun to recognize as endemic to the Nixons. 

Beside Blanche, Nix was rakish in his suit. His hair gleamed dully in the low light, coiffed just so. He’d shaved for the occasion, and up close his cheeks bore haphazard pink sprays of fading razor burn. Dick liked him clean-shaven. As he watched Nix now he felt a quickening; he wasn’t sure he’d thought of it before, specifically, that he liked Nix to look a certain way. Nix’s mouth was red to match his sister’s, their lips bright as cherries, and Dick liked that too, but it wasn’t Blanche Dick wanted. The realization was more staggering than perhaps it should have been. But to know this with certainty, to feel he stood more solidly upon the ground because he knew it--Dick could be dreaming. 

Nix came over and let them be pressed together by the flow of the crowd, the better to let his lips graze Dick’s ear. “Shut your mouth,” he said. “You’ll let in flies.” 

He threw his arm around Dick with a buddyish nonchalance. They moved along into the dining room, following along behind Blanche, and it wasn’t until they found a table that Nix let his arm fall. 

Nix wasted no time in ordering a round of drinks, and by the time the band began to play he was lit up in a way Dick hadn’t seen since Europe. Their table became an island in the sea of people, and the longer they sat there the more people drifted by, friends of Blanche and of Nix by extension. As he watched Nix with them, drunk, batting words back and forth like a sportsman, Dick thought he must be glimpsing him as he’d been before. Before the war, before everything. 

“Hi,” said a voice in his ear. Blanche stood at his elbow. She was cradling a glass, the contents of which had dwindled down to the ice cubes. “Buy a girl a drink?” 

“Sure,” Dick said.

He got up from the table, glad for the chance to move. Blanche took his arm. He looked for Nix, hoping to catch his eye, but he was absorbed in conversation with a blonde woman who’d thrown her head back, laughing, and put her hand on Nix’s hand. Dick turned away then, and he and Blanche cut through the crowd together. Dick leaned on the bar and had about as much luck with the bartender as he had with Nix, until Blanche slid in beside him and the man suddenly had enough of polishing glasses and made a beeline over. 

“What’ll it be?” 

“Tom Collins,” she said to the bartender. She looked back at Dick. 

“Oh,” he said. “Just a soda water.” 

“You really don’t drink,” she said, when the bartender had turned away. 

“Once in a blue moon,” Dick said. 

“This isn’t blue enough? And anyway, you drank champagne at the Waldorf.” She tapped her temple with a lacquered nail and smiled at him. “I remember these things.” 

She must be used to smiling at men that way. He was learning, he thought, how people moved through the world. The war had shown him that too, the animal ways people scuttled around. Something buried under rocks you could kick up if you took a moment to look. 

“I sipped,” Dick said. “My last real drink was on V-E day, if that’s any indication.” 

She laughed. “Ah. Well. I suppose I’ve got my share of moxie, Dick, but I don’t flatter myself capable of competing with the liberation of Europe.”

“I don’t know,” Dick said. “There’s more than one fellow here who’d probably argue with that.” 

“Would you?” 

Dick spluttered. He didn’t even have a drink to blame it on, but mercifully the bartender chose that moment to bring them their order. By the time he’d worked out the tab the moment had passed, and Blanche’s smile had faded. She stared into her drink contemplatively, and Dick let his gaze stray back to their table. Nix was absent; a scan of the room yielded him and the blonde, dancing. 

“He’s incorrigible,” Blanche said. 

“How do you mean?” 

“The usual. Drinking, flirting.” 

She said this affectionately, and Dick saw that she was looking at Nix too, warmth on her face. He liked her; he’d liked her when he met her because she liked Nix, loved Nix in the way Dick did, comfortably and entirely for himself. 

“Is he different?” Dick asked quietly. 

“What do you mean?” 

“I mean do you think the war--changed him?” 

Blanche snorted. “For the better, if anything. Poor Lewis; of the two of us it was much harder for him to get away with doing nothing. He used to whine to me about it when we were younger. ‘It’s not fair, Blanche.’ I think the war finally gave him something to do.” 

“He was very good at what he did,” Dick said. He couldn’t ever tell Nix that. He’d be shouted down with protest before he even got the words out. 

She looked at him, eyes wide with shock, and Dick liked her a shade less just then. “Was he?” 

Dick nodded. “Yeah.” 

“Then I suppose it’s been hard on him, coming home. He’s always hated the business, always had it hanging there like a damned guillotine. I expect it’s a bit easier with you around, though. Living in that big house.” 

Dick looked around them. “Did his wife like all this?” 

“She loved it. She met him at a place like this, you know. All three of us used to have a hell of a time together, them and me and--well, Lewis would call them my flavors of the week. But a girl can’t be tied down, Dick. You understand. Kathy tied herself down and look where she ended up--flabby and taking tea with my mother.” 

Dick couldn’t tell whether not she was joki. 

“Lew said you were engaged,” he said. “During the war.” 

She flinched, her body folding at the midsection just enough to be noticeable, as if she’d gasped around a fist to the gut. 

Dick screwed his eyes shut. “I’m sorry,” he said in a rush. “That was--” 

“No, it’s all right. He’s right. He was a good guy, and I suppose I did love him. But we made a bit of a rash decision, if you want to know the truth. So--”

“Blanche--” 

“--So you shouldn’t waste your time feeling badly for me, Dick.” She gulped her drink. 

“Finish yours,” she said, shoving his soda water down the bar at him. “And then let’s dance.” 

“I’m not very good,” Dick said. If she heard him, she didn’t let on. 

The moment they got out onto the floor the band began to play a slow song, sweeping and dirgelike to Dick’s ear. Blanche looked at him and the corner of her mouth quirked in a way that reminded Dick of himself, and that made it easier to pull her close to him and move round the floor together. Across the room the blonde girl had her head on Nix’s shoulder, and only now did Dick find the circumstances begin to prick at him, the drowsy loll of her body, the way Nix saw him looking and did nothing at all. 

***

“You can’t go all the way back out to New Jersey,” Blanche said when the night was over, when they’d spilled back out onto the street. “You’ve got to spend the night at my place.” 

“She just wants someone to cook breakfast in the morning,” Nix said. “She’s a shitty cook, aren’t you?” 

They were walking down the street together, too late for the train. They’d stop and call a cab soon enough when they all got tired of walking, but for now the momentum of the evening seemed to carry them, Nix stomping along on one side of Dick and Blanche on the other, her step lighter on the concrete. 

“Lewis,” she said. “I’m appalled at your language.” She took a wide step down the sidewalk, wobbling in her heels. “I’m surprised you’re here at all, honestly. I’d’ve thought you’d have a nice cozy nest all sorted out with Blondie back there and leave Dick and me to fend for ourselves.” 

Out of the corner of Dick’s eye he could see Nix turn and look hard at him, waiting for some reaction. Unsatisfied, Nix ducked around to look at Blanche, for whom the joke had been just that, a wisp of a moment come and gone. Lit as she was--and she was; he’d gone back to the bar on her behalf for another Tom Collins and a neat whiskey besides--she’d needle her brother with impunity and wouldn’t look beyond the small jolt of pleasure she’d gotten out of the deal. Dick couldn’t blame her, not really. After all, she couldn’t know any better. Nix and he were the ones complicating things. 

In the cab Dick sat between them. Nix stared out the window, and when Blanche turned to look out of hers Dick knocked Nix’s knee with his own. Nix looked up and raised his eyebrows in a question he well knew Dick couldn’t answer, and Dick found he was too tired to let it rile him. 

“Look, you don’t have to put us up,” Dick said outside Blanche’s building. 

She grabbed Nix’s wrist and held his watch up so she could look at the face. “I do, as a matter of fact,” she said. “The trains out to Nixon have stopped running.” 

“I told you we should’ve brought the car,” said Nix, wrenching his arm back. 

“It’s no trouble,” Blanche said. “Luckily for you I’ve got a couple of sofas.” 

“Well thank God,” Nix drawled. “I can’t imagine splitting a sofa with this lug.” 

“We wouldn’t,” said Dick immediately. “You’d be camping on the floor, no question.” 

“Hey!” 

“You’ve done worse for yourself over the years, Lew.”

“Damn right. I shared a foxhole with you, didn’t I? You’re all knees and elbows.” 

Blanche did have two sofas, and enough blankets and pillows to make them up like cots. Dick was grateful; there was still a part of him that luxuriated in a roof and four walls and someplace soft to lay his head. Blanche’s apartment was fine indeed, the kind of place that looked unassuming in the manner only achievable by the very rich, a whiff of the same old-world patina as the manors and castles they made their billets in Germany. There were half-full ashtrays here and there and--per Nix--nothing much in the icebox, a home kept by someone who had better things to do, with a view of the park that had apparently rivaled Nix’s own once upon a time. 

“Although I lived on the more upmarket side,” he added. 

“ _Lived,_ ” Blanche said, smiling sweetly. She set a bundle of linens down on the end of one sofa and patted Dick on the shoulder. “Try not to smother him in the night. Not that I’d blame you.” 

“I’ll do my best,” Dick said. 

Blanche giggled. “Well, that’s all for me, I’m afraid,” she said. She kissed Nix on the cheek where he stood swaying on the blue carpet, and then without hesitation she turned and leaned up and kissed Dick too. 

“I’ll see you both in the morning,” she said, giving a little wave. Then she was gone, leaving Dick to rub at his cheek absent-mindedly, a caricature of moonstruck awe. 

“Don’t get too excited,” Nix said when she had gone. “She’s like that with everyone.” He went over to one of the sofas and started tossing overstuffed cushions onto the floor, where they landed with sounds like distant explosions. 

“Like what?” Dick asked. 

“You know what.” 

Nix was undressing right there in the center of the living room. He unbuttoned his shirt so quickly Dick thought he’d yank the buttons free, kicked off his shoes and sat down heavily, levered his ass up and stripped his trousers down. They got caught up around his ankles, and he flailed like a line-caught fish til he got them off. 

“Goddammit,” Nix muttered. At last he was down to his shorts and undershirt, and he stretched out along the length of the sofa. It was dusty blue to match the carpet, and with a lone lamp on the room was cast in navy and lilac. 

“Shut that light off, will you?” 

“In a minute.” 

Taking his clothes off didn’t seem entirely seemly, but the idea of sleeping in his suit and tie made Dick’s skin prickle. He’d have to be sure and rise early, he thought, before Blanche was the wiser. Having sufficiently rationalized the act, he undressed and folded his trousers and shirt and set them on the floor next to his shoes. He turned the lamp off and lay down, pulled his own quilt over him. He could feel Nix there in the dark, the bulk of him somehow made more obtrusive by his silence, the way he breathed. 

“What?” Dick said finally. 

“You want to come over here?” 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” 

Nix sighed. “Of course not,” he said, and fell silent again. Before long Dick could feel his agitation rise up again like a tide, tangible, audible, a caustic sandward rasp.

“I was just thinking,” he said. “You know that girl I fucked in Aldbourne?” 

Dick winced. “I know what you’re talking about.” 

“I was so angry at you,” said Nix. “Standing there in that hallway. I remember thinking to myself ‘just what the hell does he think he’s doing?’ But you were right, dammit.” 

“Nix--” 

“I should’ve listened to you. You were right.” 

“You telling me you regret it?” 

“Who, the girl?” 

“The girl. Or Kathy. It’s all right if you--if you miss her. Blanche said you all used to go out together just like this.” 

“Oh, so that’s how the two of you got so buddy-buddy,” said Nix. “Figures. Hell, Dick, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the war I ought to regret. Got me thinking too much. Showed me all kinds of things that might be worth having. Too fucking late.” 

“What are you talking about?” 

Nix groaned. “Forget it. Just come over here, damn you.” 

Dick was running his fingers along the grain of the upholstery. Rhythms, paths worn--they always made things easier. “Your sister,” he said. 

“She’s seen worse.” 

Dick didn’t know what to say to that--first, he doubted it to be true; second, he balked at the notion of the two of them balancing like crows on some wire between bad and not so bad. 

“We can’t,” he said.

He laid his worrying hand on his chest like he could strum his heart the same as he had the couch brocade, dip in straight through the ribs and go. From across the coffee table he heard Nix curse softly, the rustle of fabric as he got up and wove around the table with the orthostatic lurch of a man recently horizontal. 

Dick sat up. “What’re you doing?” 

“Don’t mind me,” Nix said. “I’m just--” 

In lieu of a full answer he lowered himself to the floor. He settled beside Dick and leaned his ear against the sofa, and the smudge of his head against the paler dark of the night-lit room was too much for Dick, made what he did next seem imperative: the slide of his fingers into Nix’s hair, the way he tugged just so and Nix’s head came back, throat bared. 

“We can’t,” Dick said again.

“Just a kiss, then,” Nix murmured. 

“One,” Dick said. 

He fell forward. The angle was awkward; a muscle somewhere in his sacrum came alight in protest. He was cradling Nix’s head, he realized, holding it in place. Here you are, he thought. I’ve watched you all night. 

***

Saturday afternoon found him back in the side yard again, on his knees in the dirt and going at it with a trowel he’d found in the shed, the only usable item there save a couple of buckets, a bag of ancient chicken feed long ravaged by mice, and a rake so decrepit half the tines were rusted away to nothing. Dick picked it up anyway and carried it outside, hefting it in his hand and wondering just who had ever used it in this house. Not Nix, for certain. Probably not his father. The house once stood on considerably more sprawling grounds; at some point it had been subdivided, probably around the time the Nixons decided their fortunes lay in nitration alone and that whatever halfhearted efforts at husbandry the average well-to-do turn-of-the-century homeowner undertook were better off abandoned. Maybe there’d been a groundskeeper; maybe in the summer there was a man who came to do the yard. The lawn, Nix would call it if Dick asked. Not this summer. Dick would buy a mower, pay a neighbor kid on the days he was too busy to mow himself. 

But now it was winter, for most of another month at least. The dirt in the old bed was hard, packed like concrete, but Dick found that once you got past the crust things were a little easier. He kicked up the surface of the bed, unearthing grubs and small, perturbed beetles and another few buttons and a 1918 penny he set aside to give to Nix. He rubbed the copper free of dirt and stared down at Abe for a solid minute, somber in profile, staring out beyond the bounds of the coin, gaze fixed on something in the distance. 

When he’d worked his way across the whole bed he stood, went inside and washed up. Nix was sitting in the library reading, and when Dick ducked his head into the doorway he felt a little like an interloper, obliged to knock on the wall and let Nix look up before speaking. 

“I’m going into town,” Dick said. “Want anything?” 

Nix set his book down on the ottoman. “I’ll come along.” 

Dick grinned. “You want to walk?” 

“Better take the car,” Nix said. “We need groceries.” 

They took Dick’s car. “You’ve got to run the engine from time to time so it doesn’t quit on you,” he said when Nix gave the Ford his habitual skeptical once over. Dick rolled his eyes. “You’re a snob, you know that?” 

“Guilty as charged,” Nix said. Inside, he ran an appraising hand over the dashboard, peered inside the glovebox as though it contained some inherent marker of quality. “Trust you to go and buy the cheapest thing that does the job.” 

“I’m economical,” Dick said, pulling off the curb.

“Or Puritanical. God forbid you get a whiff of something goddamn pleasurable for a minute--” 

Dick cleared his throat, eyes on the morse dash center of the road. “Pleasurable, Lewis? Like what?” Which shut Nix up good and proper, and encouraged him to get out a stub of pencil and scrawl a shopping list on the back of a toll receipt. 

At the market they took a basket each and tore Nix’s list in two. Dick was happy, and not only because he could pay for his half without more than a cursory protest from Nix. When he was finished he hung around by the registers waiting, pretending to be thinking very hard about a pack of chewing gum and watching Nix over the top of the candy rack. He was looking at a pile of skinny bronze pears, and as Dick watched he picked one up and felt it all over with tender fingers, put it up close to his face to smell. And Dick had a thought then: what if he weren’t Nix, but just another person, and Dick just a man by the registers, looking at chewing gum. What would he see? He hazarded a guess, played at detachment and imagined. Perhaps he’d be put off by a mouth so close to the fruit. Perhaps he’d think that the man’s sweater was fine-gauged and the color of oatmeal, that it looked warm, or that his hair had battled the late February wind and come out the loser. All the bland nothings one thinks when watching people, killing time. 

But more than likely he would have bought his gum and walked right out, and never noticed Nix at all. There was something so melancholy and unfathomable about the idea that Dick got entirely caught up in it, and when Nix popped up beside him and asked him what a pack of Juicy Fruit ever did to him he started. 

“Huh? Oh. Nothing,” he said dumbly, and Nix laughed. 

They paid and put the groceries in the car. “Where to now?” Nix asked.

“The feed store,” Dick said. “I want some seed catalogues.” 

“Well that’s a riveting Saturday night.” 

“You have a better idea?” 

“Oh, I don’t know. I thought we might go to the movies. There’s a new Rita Hayworth.” 

“Ah,” Dick said. “Should’ve left that part out. Now I know why you really want to go.” 

Nix let himself veer into Dick’s path as if by accident. “You know how I feel about redheads. I figure two’s better than one if you’re talking about sitting in a dark room for a couple of hours.” 

Dick shook his head. The backs of their hands brushed together, just a touch, just an accident. “You know, your sister said you were incorrigible.” 

“I’m entirely corrigible,” Nix said. 

“I may not have gone to Yale,” Dick said. “But I’m not sure that’s a word. Anyway, how do you feel about blondes?” 

“We were only dancing,” Nix said. 

Dick hummed. 

Nix stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, wheeled on Dick and took hold of the sleeve of his jacket. “Dammit, we were only dancing.” 

Dick froze, looked deliberately down at Nix’s fingers on him, at the intimacy of the gesture, not alone perhaps but coupled with the conversation, with the slightly strangled pitch of Nix’s voice. 

“I know you were,” he said. “I was kidding.” 

Nix dropped Dick’s sleeve and shoved his hands in his pockets, and they set off again in silence. At the feed store Dick got his seed catalogues, and a packet of a tomato variety he already knew were good growers and could take a late frost, and considered a couple of sacks of good potting soil. He decided to give the stuff in the bed a chance first. After all, who knew what the earth might come up with given the opportunity. And sentimental as it was, he liked the idea of that scraggly, rooty corner growing something good all on its own. 

Nix stayed quiet in the store, and on the drive home, and up the walk with his share of the shopping. Dick took his time coming in, figuring he’d give Nix time enough to let whatever it was blow over. Nix was mercurial; his lows tended towards the abysmal, but Dick found he could generally coax him around. He wasn’t beyond plying him with a glass of something, either, not that he was proud. Nix at a low ebb was unsettling in a way Dick couldn’t quite put to words. Always had been, from the first time Dick had seen him that way, back at Toccoa over something little, something Dick could barely remember, some scrap with his father over the phone. 

When Dick went inside at last Nix was in the kitchen, sitting at the table. There was a glass of whiskey in front of him and the groceries ringed his feet, still in their crisp paper bags. Next to the glass was an envelope, torn open along the seal, and Nix’s fingers drummed a tattoo atop it Dick was clearly meant to notice. 

“What’s that?” Dick asked. 

Nix made to flick it at him like a skipping stone. 

“Just tell me,” Dick said, stooping to pick up one of the grocery bags. “I’ll put these away.”

“It’s from Kathy,” Nix said conversationally. “Came awhile back, actually.” 

Dick had the icebox open. The thing was poorly organized, really; you could get about twice as much inside if things weren’t shoved in every which way. 

“You didn’t say anything,” he said. 

“What was I supposed to say?” 

“What does she say?” He slid in a bottle of milk, slotted a stick of butter beside it. “Has she written you before?” 

“Not since I’ve been back.” 

From behind him he imagined Nix shaking his head with the same vehemence he’d clutched Dick’s sleeve with on the street. Dick picked up another bag and set it up on the counter and began to pull things out. Nix had bought those pears after all. He wondered if he could pick out the one Nix’s mouth had touched. If he looked close enough, maybe, if he took a bite. He put the fruit to his lips. The skin was smooth. He set his teeth against it with enough pressure to mar. 

“You want to know what she said?” Nix asked. 

Dick shrugged, his mouth full of pear now. “Sure.” 

“She said she wants to get me and the kid together,” he said. “Says she doesn’t think a child ought to grow up not knowing its father.” 

Dick swallowed, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He got a saucer out of the china cupboard and set the pear down on it. “Well, I guess she’s right,” he said. 

“Oh yeah? Maybe the two of you ought to chat. I’m sure she’ll have just as many choice words on the subject of yours truly as Blanche does.” He took a long drink and glared at Dick over the rim of the glass. 

“Is that what you’re so put out over? Me talking to your sister?” 

“I’m put out over this, dammit!” 

“When is it?” 

“I’ve got to call her,” Nix said. “Pick a date. Weekend, probably. God, Dick. What’m I going to do with a kid?” 

“What did you ever do?” 

“Knock my wife up and go away to war.” 

Dick snorted at that and went around the side of the table. He fit his hand to the curve of Nix’s shoulder, an old gesture, a remnant like the pictures he’d gotten in Austria, the ones he’d stashed in the bottom of his duffle in the bottom of the trunk Kathy Nixon had filled with sweaters. 

“You’ll be fine,” he said to Nix. 

He sounded like he was talking to one of the men, and maybe he’d never actually spoken to Nix like that before, because the tone of his voice suddenly seemed all wrong. Nix sighed, reached up and laid his own hand over Dick’s. The way he let it stay there was something entirely new. 

New was the right word for the way they touched, for how it made Dick feel. When they went upstairs to the bedroom at night, when Dick stood beside the bed and took his clothes off in a way that meant something, when Nix sat on the edge of the mattress and watched him do it. Dick was awed sometimes and scared other times by the headiness of it; for the first time he could see what Nix saw in the girl’s wine-colored curves that night in the dancehall in England. If that was half of how Dick’s pulse sped up in the bedroom in New Jersey he’d have to take it all back, tell Nix he was the worst kind of hypocrite. 

Dick told himself over and over that this was different, that there was an essential uniqueness to the athletics of their bodies together: the quiver of their muscles, the burn of their lungs, their wide-open mouths. He’d have let Nix take him in the grimmest of circumstances. A hole in the ground, the hold of a ship. He wouldn’t have run had someone happened upon them there; he knew that for certain. But he wondered sometimes what exactly he’d have done instead. 

“Can I ask you a question?” 

“Shoot,” Nix said. 

They were lying side by side, heads on the same pillow. This close, Nix’s breath was heavy with alcohol, although Dick had pried the bottle from his fingers earlier than usual tonight. He had been reticent all through dinner. Dick had asked if he wanted to go and see that Rita Hayworth picture after all, but Nix had just blinked at him as though he’d forgotten entirely. 

“Did you ever think about this?” 

Nix’s eyes were heavy-lidded, his look a boundless thing that ran all over Dick like water. To be so close to a look like that made Dick want to turn his face into the pillow, but you ask a man a question, you look him in the eye and wait for your answer. 

“About you?” 

“Or anybody.” 

“If we’re talking about you, sure I thought about it. Anybody--I don’t know. Any guy, is what you mean. And I don’t know, Dick. Maybe sometimes.” 

Nix rubbed his nose, seeming happy to be momentarily obscured, letting his hand fan over his eyes. “How about you?” 

“Me?” 

“Turnabout’s fair play,” Nix said. 

Dick swallowed. “I didn’t think much about anyone.” 

“C’mon.” 

Dick shrugged against the mattress. The quilt slipped down his shoulder and a crop of goosebumps followed. Nix laid his arm over Dick’s back; his fingers found the curling hair at the nape of Dick’s neck. 

“I need a haircut,” Dick said. 

Nix ran his hand down and fiddled with the ridge of Dick’s shoulder blade. He seemed determined tonight to touch Dick in all sorts of places. 

“Don’t change the subject. You didn’t take a girl out?” 

Dick made a frustrated noise. “When was I going to take a girl out? Between school and work?” 

“You take them to dinner. To the movies. Sometimes you go for a drive. It’s not exactly an endurance trial.”

Nix’s thumb now, along his collarbone. Dick closed his eyes. Through the thin skin of his eyelids he imagined he could still watch Nix watching him. All these little touches, all these truths Nix might pull from him. He’d taken girls out, sure he had. He made an okay date; he picked them up on time and dropped them home, danced with them and held their hand in the back seat of a friend’s car when it hit a slick patch of pavement and spun out. But he let go as soon as possible afterwards lest they get the wrong idea--even when his hand’s retreat made the girls look at him, surprised. 

None of that was what Nix was talking about. 

“I never thought about it,” Dick said again. “I might have, one day. But the war started and then none of it seemed very important. And then I met you.” 

“Does it seem important now?” Nix asked. 

“With you,” Dick said. 

Nix sighed. He set the pad of his finger in the hollow beneath Dick’s left eye. “You’re not sleeping much.” 

Dick flinched. “I’m okay.” 

“Yeah, you’re always okay, huh. What’ll I do the day you’re not?” 

“You’ll get by,” Dick said. 

Nix laughed. “You overestimate me.” 

“No,” Dick said. “I don’t think so.” 

Nix just looked at him, eyebrows hung up on his forehead in surprise, one pink cheek contorted on the pillow. Dick kissed him. Nix got the picture too late to join in until Dick had moved back, opened his eyes again to give Nix a long once-over. His mouth hung partway open. 

“Careful, you’ll let in flies.” 

“Wise guy.” 

And it did seem important then, all at once: to sit up, to drape himself over Nix, lie on top of him and take his hands and hold them up over his head, their arms together a steeple, the space beneath sacred. All at once Nix looked surprised again, and it occurred to Dick with a shattering suddenness that he wasn’t really surprised _Dick_ should want him so, but that anyone would. 

And look, Dick said to himself, look, if you could show someone with your own body that the place your two lives overlapped had been the brightest of all then you’d be a damned fool not to, end of story. So he kissed Nix again, and harder, and later in the middle of things when they were all bound up together he touched his face and said Lew, Lewis, look at me.

***

Dick dreamed again that night. He was back in the trees. He was standing in the middle of a snowdrift; he’d sunk in, felt it slip in over the tops of his boots. He was out of breath. He’d been running, or trying to, pursued through the forest by a great corps of growling tanks, gaining even as Dick struggled fruitlessly through the frozen ground cover. The snow was heaped up all around him, halfway up the tree trunks, and he came to a place where it was thick as a brick wall and just as impenetrable. In the middle distance the tanks were baying like dogs. He fell onto his knees and began to dig. 

He woke up slowly, naturally, a fade into consciousness. He felt worse for it, more unsettled; there was none of the sudden wash of relief that came from realizing he was dreaming. Instead he opened his eyes and lay in bed breathing hard, having forgotten entirely where he was and when, and why Nix should be curled beside him and why they should both be naked when it was so cold. Dick rolled onto his side, forehead against Nix’s back. He jostled Nix until he stirred and made a muffled, unconcerned noise. 

“Nothing,” Dick said in reply. “Go back to sleep.” 

He lay there for a long time, until the sky began to lighten. He could still smell pine and snow and blood, and when he couldn’t stand it any more he went down into the kitchen and made coffee so he could smell that instead. 

***  
“You’ll be fine,” Dick said. “Didn’t I say you’d be fine?”

“Wait until it’s all over,” Nix said. “Then you can say I told you so, and I can tell you to fuck off.” 

Dick rolled his eyes. “You can’t talk like that around a kid, you know. What time’s Kathy dropping her again?” 

“Eleven. She’s got some business down around Philly, says she’ll pick her up on the way back tonight. Jesus Christ, Dick, it’s a quarter to already.”

They were in the kitchen. Nix was sitting at the table, busily filling his egg cup and its mostly uneaten occupant with cigarette ash. 

“You shouldn’t do that around a kid either,” Dick said, nodding at Nix’s third smoke of the morning. 

“Look, we can’t all be paragons of virtue.” He pushed his plate away. “Do you hear a car?” 

Dick waited in the kitchen with the washing up and let Nix go out to the curb alone. Earlier he’d made some noise about going into the office and getting some work done, but the pleading look Nix had given him put paid to that idea. He wondered if Nix and his daughter might be better off alone, if it might make things easier for Nix, let him recalibrate somehow. But Nix wanted him there, and Dick had never been great at not giving Nix precisely what he wanted. 

He heard the front door shut, and he dried his hands off on a dishtowel, cast the towel back into the sink. He turned and there Nix was, shuffling around into the doorway, and there she was, stepping around him imperiously, as if she knew somehow that once upon a time this house had been hers. She had on a blue dress and a white cardigan and a shiny white pair of patent-leather shoes. Nix had his hand on her little shoulder.

“Hey,” Nix said. 

“Hello,” Dick said. He went across and knelt in front of her and stuck out his hand. “I’m Dick. I’m friends with your dad here.” 

She cast a look back at Nix. “Hi,” she said. 

“What’s your name?” Dick asked. 

“Betsy Nixon,” she said, all in a rush. “I’m visiting.” She took Dick’s hand; her palm was sticky the way little kids always seemed sticky. Her face was round and plump-cheeked, her hair dark and scraped up into two fat pigtails, tied with bows to match her dress. She did look like Nix, arrestingly so. 

“She’s visiting,” Nix said. 

“Glad to have you, Betsy,” said Dick. 

“Do you live here too?” she asked. 

“Your dad’s letting me stay for awhile. That’s nice of him, isn’t it?” 

“Uh-huh,” she said. She was looking around the room already. Dick guessed it was only natural; not as if some strange and overly interested adult would hold a four-year-old’s interest for long. 

“Have you got a dog?” she asked. 

Dick straightened, the better to shoot a look at Nix. But you wouldn’t have known it to look that a dog had ever been a sore spot, save a trace of tightness at his jaw. 

“No,” Nix said. “We don’t have a dog.” 

“I’ve got a dog,” she said. 

“Do you? What’s his name?” Dick asked. 

“Toby,” said Nix automatically. 

Betsy slipped out from under his hand, spun around and peered up at him. “How do you know my dog’s name?” she asked. 

“Lucky guess,” said Nix. “Now, c’mon, miss. Let’s let Dick get back to work.” He gave her a little shove and she went out into the hallway, babbling something about a doll she’d brought along. 

“I’m just rinsing these plates. What’re you going to do?” 

Nix shrugged. Dick thought he looked faintly sweaty. “I guess I’ll take her down to the playground awhile,” he said. “She’s so...she’s big now. I don’t know what she likes to do for fun.” 

“You talk to Kathy about it?” 

Nix shook his head. “I was happy to let Kathy get on her way.” 

“You want some company?” 

“Twenty questions,” Nix said. He sighed. “That’s all right. You finish up here. Go to the office if you need to. We’ll get along.” 

After the two of them clattered out of the house Dick went out himself, into the side yard. The weather was warm enough to plant, and now was as good a time as any. He could’ve gone to the office, sat up at his desk and looked over the payroll, but today he had a rabbity sort of need to stick close to home. And the weather was nice, blue and breezy, and it seemed a shame to waste it shut up inside. Even Nix was out, for all he’d been forced. 

He worked his way along the length of the bed with a trowel and a bucket of fertilizer, manure he’d begged off one of the small time dairy farmers he passed going to and from the plant, a little ways out of town where the roads got windier. He found it heartening that even so close to New York City you could find a barn, a cluster of sleepy cows. 

As he worked he let his mind wander. He had a letter waiting for him on the little table in the foyer, the place they set the mail. Dick liked that, that they piled it up together. The envelope was thick cardstock, and the loopy, feminine hand that had addressed it belonged to Kitty Grogan. Nix had a matching letter; they’d come yesterday, but in the hubbub over Betsy’s visit Dick hadn’t opened his. 

_Kitty always wanted a spring wedding,_ Harry said in Normandy.

Dick remembered the long marches, the ground soaked and fetid, flooded fields traversed in a haze of biting insects. He’d always thought it lovely, if optimistic, that Harry could struggle through the most adverse conditions and make some dreamy association with the things his girl liked. Dick hoped she had a fine dress; he hoped parachute silk had a nice drape. He ought to write to Harry. He ought to write to all of them. He’d send a note with the RSVP. The others...well, he’d get to it.

Dick was planting corn today. He’d started it a couple of weeks back the same way he’d started his tomatoes, in pots he kept inside in the mud room. Nix laughed to see him do it, sitting on the floor heaping soil into terracotta rounds, but when the plants sprouted he’d been oddly fascinated, crowded ‘round and put out his finger to pet a lone sprig where it broke resolutely out of the black earth. 

Would you look at that, Nix had said. And he’d kissed Dick then, gotten down to sit crosslegged beside him on the floor and got dirt all over his pants and kissed him in the middle of everything.

Corn was a hungry plant. That’s what Dick had always been told. You had to carve a little cup for every seedling, fill it with fertilizer, and then once they were planted you watched the leaves, came down and ran your hands over them as they grew. Corn turned pale and sallow when it got too hungry, sucked everything up from the surrounding soil in a mad grasp at satiety. Corn was troublesome that way. It wanted what it wanted. 

He was finishing up the first row when he heard the sound, careening up the street like a siren. He turned and got to his feet, wiped his palms off idly on his thighs. Down the sidewalk came the staggering figure of Nix, his daughter in his arms. She looked limp at first and Dick was fearful, but then her whole body moved, flopping in Nix’s grasp like a fish. Her face was red; she was gathering breath to scream. When she did, it seemed the loudest thing Dick had ever heard. 

“You’re too damn heavy,” he heard Nix say as they drew closer. He let her slip down onto the sidewalk. She shrieked louder, and Dick saw then that her knees were scraped and bleeding. 

“What happened?” he said, feeling as if he were calling over the top of a wall. 

“She wasn’t looking where she was going,” Nix said. “I told her three goddamn times to slow down and look where she was going.” 

“My hands!” she was wailing. “My hands!” She held them up in front of her. Her palms looked as bad as her knees. 

“Here, come here,” Nix said, grabbing for her, but she twisted away, the force of the motion enough to send her reeling down onto the sidewalk on her backside. 

“Jesus, Betsy,” Nix said. He went down on one knee and made as if to gather her up, but she was a mad thing then, scrabbling like a cat. 

“No,” she screamed. “No, I want my mom!” 

Nix grabbed her and hoisted her over his shoulder, cursing under his breath. She flailed again, jack-knifing in his arms as though she were having a fit. Blood ran from her right knee, a tendril down her shin that bloomed into her white sock. Dick stood by and watched, the scene before him a tableau, Nix’s face grim, the girl in his arms a small animal. 

As Dick followed Nix took her inside and sat her on the kitchen table, right there on the tablecloth, her foal’s legs kicking. ”Don’t,” Nix said to her. “You’ll make it worse.” 

He set about fetching a towel, a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Betsy grew quieter, her shoulders shaking, tears running down her cheeks. She seemed somehow to know that she’d gotten herself into a mess, that the two of them had no idea what they were doing. 

“Have we got any Band-Aids?” Dick asked. “Lew?” 

“I don’t know,” Nix snapped. “Go look upstairs.”  
Dick turned and went, taking the stairs two at a time. Behind him Betsy began to cry again, and he could hear Nix talking to her, his voice at first soft and solicitous, then canting upwards, losing patience. He should hurry. Dick was dimly aware that the day was quite possibly ruined, that something downstairs was spinning out like a reel of film. 

He jogged into the bathroom and threw open the mirrored medicine cabinet, the door hitting the wall behind it with a force that made Dick wince and hold his breath til he was sure he hadn’t shattered the glass. The cabinet was dusty and under-occupied, housing only a bottle of headache tablets, a skinny black comb, and a brace of rusting safety pins. Dick sighed and went out of the bathroom and pawed through a couple of the bedroom drawers to no avail. He went back down the stairs again, full of trepidation and uselessness. In the kitchen Betsy had calmed. She was still perched on the table, top lip tucked tightly under the bottom, nose streaming. Nix was squatting in front of her, a dish towel pressed to one of her knees. 

“No luck,” Dick said. “Sorry.” 

“Mommy has Band-Aids,” Betsy said breathlessly. “I need a Band-Aid. Mommy always--” 

“Hey,” said Nix. His voice was sharp. Dick braced, but then he said it again-- _hey_ \--and this time it was softer. “I think we’re all right here,” Nix said to her. “Don’t you?” 

He looked over his shoulder. “Dick, you want to get us some ice?” 

Dick went to the icebox, retrieved a couple of cubes from the tray and wrapped them in a second cloth. Nix took them from him with a nod of thanks, bundled the dish cloth around the ice neatly and set it against the knob of Betsy’s knee. 

“There,” Nix said. “We’ll clean you up, and then I think--I _think_ we might just skip lunch and go find some ice cream. How’s that sound?” 

“Good,” she said. 

“Sound good to you, Dick?” 

“Sounds great, Lew.” 

Betsy looked up at that and wrinkled her nose. “Lew!” she said, drawing the name out gleefully. A giggle, a singsong. Dick smiled at her, and she smiled back. Her teeth were a little crooked. He remembered Nix telling him once about falling on his face as a boy and knocking a front tooth loose, wandering around with a gappy grin til his second set came in. 

“Hey Betsy,” Dick said. “I know a story about your dad.” 

***

Late afternoon found them all in the library. Nix had found a battered copy of _The Wind in the Willows_ tucked into one of the bookshelves, and he and Betsy sat on the couch together and read. Dick sank into the adjacent armchair, pretending to look at the paper but really watching over the top of it as Nix read and Betsy’s head nodded. Presently her eyes fell shut and her little body slumped over onto Nix’s with an indolent and careless weight. 

“Must be nice,” Nix said quietly. 

“Yeah,” said Dick. He sighed. “She’s a good kid, Nix.” 

“When she’s not screaming the house down, you mean.” 

“I think she was entitled,” Dick said. 

He watched Nix look down at her. She had a film of chocolate around her mouth, evidence of the lunch that wasn’t. Nix narrowed his eyes as if looking for something specific. Dick had seen Nix look at battle plans, at troop allotments and encrypted maps and cans of Army peaches, all of them regarded with more comprehension than Dick saw on his face now. 

“Are you glad she came?” Dick asked gently. 

Nix shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Seems like she could’ve done without it, though. She took a hit, some guy bought her an ice cream cone. Might work out an even trade, I don’t know.” 

“Lew,” Dick started, but then the doorbell rang. Nix looked up at him and held his gaze, and whatever platitude Dick had had to offer died on his tongue. The doorbell rang a second time, and Nix began to extricate himself from under Betsy’s sleeping form. 

“Here we go, kiddo. Time to go,” he said, slipping his arm beneath her shoulders. “Shit, her face is a mess,” he said as if to himself. “I’d better get a washcloth.” He looked up at Dick and jerked his head at the door. “You mind letting her in?”

Dick had always pictured Kathy walking around looking just like the lone picture he’d seen, the one Nix used to carry around framed in his footlocker, taking up precious bottle space. Seeing her on the doorstep now he realized he’d never had any real idea what she looked like after all; there was only the picture he’d sketched up in his mind and the unflattering feelings that went along with it. Her face was fuller than he’d imagined. He remembered Blanche calling her flabby at the nightclub and thought the description uncharitable. She had golden hair that fell to her shoulders. She was dressed in a camel-colored travelling suit. She had the look of someone not easily surprised. 

“Oh,” she said when Dick opened the door. She looked him up and down. “Blanche said Lewis had a friend staying.” 

“Richard Winters,” he said, sticking his hand out. How strange to see her after all this time. He wondered if she could sniff out the way he cared for Nix, having felt the same. Maybe it was like the chicken pox, carried around indefinitely. 

“Not _the_ Richard Winters,” she said. 

“Ma’am?” 

“It’s just funny, is all. Whenever I managed to get a letter out of Lew you were all he talked about, and now here you are in the flesh.” 

“He wrote you about me?” Dick had never imagined she’d have thought of him. Now here they were, each looking at the other. Probably she’d had some picture of him in her mind he was now failing to live up to. 

“Once or twice,” she said. “Which should tell you something about how often he wrote, period.” She grimaced. 

_I’m sorry_ , Dick nearly said, but he bit the inside of his cheek and held off. But he did feel bad; standing in front of her at last he was surprised at how bad he felt. It was worse somehow than Nix’s tantrum in Germany. 

“How are you finding the town?” she asked. By the look on her face she’d found it lacking. 

“Just fine,” he said. “Do you want to come inside? I think Lew’s getting things together. Betsy fell asleep on the sofa.” 

“Wonderful,” said Kathy. “I’ll have a hell of a time getting her down later if she wakes up.” She cast an eye up at the facade of the house. “And thank you,” she continued, “But I’m all right out here. I want to get on the road again.” 

“Will you be alright, going back alone in the dark?” 

“I’ve spent plenty of time alone, Mr. Winters.” 

Dick didn’t have a single thing to say to that, so it was a mercy that Nix chose that moment to come into the doorway, Betsy cradled in his arms, her doll nestled beside her. 

“Hi,” he said to Kathy. 

“Hi, Lewis.” She was looking at the girl, at her sleeping face. Kathy looked like she wanted to reach out and touch her, as if to reassure herself she was still intact. 

“I should tell you, she took a bit of spill earlier,” Nix said, sounding sheepish. “Tripped on the sidewalk and tore up her hands and knees.” He nodded down at her.

“God, couldn’t you have put a bandage on it? She’ll get an infection.” She did reach for Betsy then, yanked her driving glove off and prodded gently at her knee. 

“We cleaned her up all right. Didn’t we, Dick.” 

Kathy glanced from Dick to Nix and back as though she very much doubted that. “Well, I’ll put something on it at home. Here, lay her in the back seat.” She went over to the car, a shiny white roadster with the top up. 

“Yeah, okay. I’ll just--I’ll just wake her up and say goodbye, huh?” 

“No, don’t,” Kathy said quickly. “I want her to sleep on the drive; it’ll be easier than having her squirming around the car. C’mon, Lew, put her in so we can get going. I’ll tell her you said goodbye.” 

“Sure you will,” Nix said. 

He sighed, went over to the car and laid Betsy down longways on the seat. Then he ducked back out again, stood and looked at Kathy with his arms folded over his chest. “Well, be careful,” he said. 

“Of course. I’ll call you, okay? We can set up another visit.” 

“Oh, I don’t know,” Nix said, his voice hoarse. “I was just thinking we--maybe we ought to give it a miss for awhile. ‘Til she’s a little older. I think it might’ve been confusing for her, coming out here, and when she fell…” 

Kathy frowned. “You think so? She looked forward to today, you know. She talked about it all week.” 

“I’ll call,” Nix said. “Talk to her, maybe. If that’s all right.” 

“Sure,” Kathy said. She looked as if she wanted to say something, but she didn’t, just shook her head. “Goodnight,” she said. “It was nice to meet you,” she said to Dick. Then she slid gracefully into the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. 

The headlights cast them in an obliterating glare. Nix had his hand up, shading his eyes like a visor. As the car began to roll backwards he turned away and brushed past Dick on his way back into the house. 

“I need a drink,” he said, going into the sitting room and heading straight for the wet bar. He poured himself an overlarge quantity of whiskey and knocked it back in one swallow, and then he filled his tumbler again.

“C’mon, Dick,” he said, sloshing some of the golden liquid into a second glass. “Are you really going to make me drink alone every single time?” He brought the drinks and the bottle over to the sofa and sat heavily beside Dick. He raised his glass. “Cheers, goddammit.” 

“You’ve barely eaten all day,” Dick said, accepting the glass from Nix and setting it immediately on the side table. “You want to slow down?” 

“You know, it’s impolite not to cheers,” Nix said. “Probably bad luck or something.” 

“I’m sorry,” Dick said. 

“You are not.” 

“Why did you tell Kathy you didn’t want Betsy to visit again?” 

Nix appeared to be very occupied with the weave of a cushion. He pulled it onto his lap, flipped it this way and that, tangled his fingers in the trim. “Huh?” he said. 

“You heard me. Today went well. Didn’t it? So why say that to her?” 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Nix said. He shook his glass, ice cubes clinking musically against the sides. Dick could learn to hate that sound.

“God, am I finished with this already?” Nix asked. “Where does the time go? Honestly.” 

“It’s not a question of time,” Dick said. “We’ve been in this room five minutes.” 

“What’s your point?” 

Dick sighed. “Lew, c’mon. Let’s go in the kitchen. I’ll make you something to eat.” 

Nix barked a laugh. “What, a tin of beans?” 

“Something.” 

Dick took hold of Nix’s arm and made as if to pull him along. Nix sat back, wrenched his arm away in a manner that could have been either playful or violent. He was like that when he drank sometimes; there was an edge to him Dick didn’t like. He didn’t know this version of Nix so well, though he felt he ought to. The unfamiliarity bred worry in him, as if he were some foreign weapon Dick couldn’t disarm. 

“I’m not hungry,” Nix said. “C’mon, lemme alone.” 

“You told me you wanted me to tell you when it went fine,” Dick said. “It did. It went fine. I told you it would, I told you so. So do it, tell me--” 

Nix looked at him, eyes wide. “I won’t tell you that,” he said. “I won’t say that to you.”

“Then what? You had a good day. She had fun. And Kathy said it herself, she looked forward to seeing you.” 

“She’s a kid,” Nix said. “She doesn’t know what she wants. What she wants changes from minute to minute. Let’s leave it, okay? Tell me what you thought of Kathy.” 

Dick didn’t see how that was any better, but to be fair it didn’t seem strictly worse. In the window he could see the yellow glare of light reflected, another mirrored room housing two more men. He wondered what they were talking about. Maybe in that room the redheaded one was knocking them back, the other sitting by powerless to stop the night from sliding off its rails. It wasn’t the day they’d ruined, after all. 

“I don’t know,” Dick said. He cleared his throat. “I didn’t know you wrote her about me. I didn’t know she knew who I was.” 

Nix smiled, the first real smile Dick had seen from him today. He poured himself another drink. “What was I supposed to talk about? Everything else was classified.” 

“It was weird, is all. You writing her about me. Me being here today.” 

“What’s it matter? It wasn’t some big reunion. It’s over between her and me, has been for a long time. If you’re trying to find some way to make that your fault, don’t bother.” He groaned. “Look, I’m bad company tonight, all right? Why don’t you go upstairs.” 

“What’ll you do?” 

“I don’t know. Go for a drive. I want to go for a drive. I don’t want to be in the house.” 

“You can’t take the car out like this,” Dick said. 

He set his hand on Nix’s thigh, but Nix stood, brushed his hand off the way he had Dick’s grip on his arm. “Like what?” Nix said. Say it, he seemed to dare Dick. Tell me. 

“I’ll worry,” Dick said, deflecting.

“Don’t,” Nix said. 

“I’ll come with you.” . 

“You can’t. Just stay here.” Nix scrubbed a hand over his face. He hefted the bottle of whiskey and tucked it under his arm. 

Dick could grow to hate that bottle too, if he didn’t already: the stark white type stamped on flat black, missing only the skull-and-crossbones to mark the stuff for what it was. But still he let Nix screw the top back on the bottle and cross the room and go out into the hallway, the same way he’d carved out space in his footlocker, the same way he’d cheered Nix up with a cellarful of this same toxicant.

He heard the jingle of Nix palming his keys. He went out the front door, and Dick didn’t think once of going after him. Instead he sat and watched the ice melt in his untouched drink, listened to the crisp sounds the cubes made as they heaved and slid like tiny calving glaciers. He picked the glass up, fingertips slipping in the beaded condensation. He took a sip. Even watered down the whiskey tasted bad, potent, and he set the glass back down again. 

I’ll never understand, he thought. He imagined saying that to Nix a moment ago, when he’d given Dick that look. You’re a drunk, was what Nix had wanted Dick to say. But Nix was a drunk, and they’d both known it too long for the words to be anything but fingers at an oft-picked scab. 

He laid his head back on the sofa. He was tired. He hadn’t been sleeping; he’d meant it when he told Nix he was okay but that didn’t change the fact he was tired, was seeping into the cushions now like he ran through the snow every night, like sludge, like sand. He’d shut his eyes. Just for a minute. Then he’d go into the kitchen and find something to eat. Leave a sandwich out for Nix, when he came in. 

***

“Dick,” came the voice in his dream. “Dick, wake up.” 

Someone was shaking him. He blinked awake to find himself still in the sitting room, the glass of whiskey iceless now, clear water sitting atop the weightier gold. Nix stood over him, his hands all over the front of Dick’s shirt. His hands were wet, Dick realized, and that wasn’t right at all. Nix had gone driving. Dick sat up and looked him in the face. 

There was a fine crust of red ringing one nostril; the other bled freely, and Nix had been at it already with his sleeve, with the cuff of his shirt. The wet on his hands wasn’t blood, though, but water, and his shirt was wet too and streaked with mud. 

“You’re bleeding,” Dick said. 

Nix reached up and touched his nose as if this was news to him. “I, um,” he started. “I hit a deer.” 

“You what?” 

“I hit a goddamn deer with the car.” 

“Jesus Christ, Lew.” Dick pulled him down onto the sofa, leaned over him to get a better look. “Are you alright?” He put his hands to Nix’s face, the blood too bright, skin beneath greying with stubble. 

“I guess so,” Nix said. 

“We should--should we get a doctor?” 

He wanted to curse for how far away Eugene Roe was; he’d have known what to do, known all the right places to press, to test for breaks, for instability. 

Nix batted Dick’s hand away. “I’m fine.” 

“Where’s the car?” 

“Couple miles up the road.” 

“You walked back?” 

“It’s wrecked, Dick. Jesus. Front’s all torn up and I couldn’t see out the fucking windshield.” 

“Shit,” Dick said softly. 

The word did something to Nix’s face, made it crumple. It made Dick angry to see that look. He was tired, still, and he’d been sleeping at last and Nix’s body listed on the couch mockingly as if he was tired too, as if he could go to sleep right here. Dick would be up all night now. His eyes stung. 

“We should go get it,” Dick said. 

“You can’t drive it,” Nix said. 

“I want to see.” He got up, went into the hallway and got his keys. He looked down at them and was angry all over again. Trust Nix to wreck the good car. He should have taken Dick’s, but he’d never have thought to. It wouldn’t have occurred to him. 

Nix followed him out of the house. “Dick, I’m tired. Come back inside. We’ll go in the morning.” 

“I’m tired too.” Dick sighed. Already the endeavor had begun to seem pointless, but he was up now. “Stay here if you want,” he said over his shoulder, but Nix was beside him, cursing softly, head down, abashed. 

The night was cool and misty; when he’d felt the damp on Nix’s shirt Dick had thought at first of rain, but now they were together in the enclosed front seat he could smell a familiar cloying scent and he realized Nix had soaked himself in whiskey. He sniffed loudly, and Nix rolled the window down. 

“Bottle broke,” he said. “It got all over the car.” 

“How’d it happen?” Dick asked quietly. Ahead of them his headlights caught shapes in the gloom, diving insects, once or twice the moonstone eyes of a rabbit. 

“I don’t know. It came out of nowhere. I was fiddling with the radio and I looked up too late. Here it is, up here.” 

Nix jabbed his finger at the embankment opposite. His car faced them the way Nix had been travelling, half on the shoulder and half in a shallow ditch that ran alongside the road. Dick gave a low whistle as his lights swooped over the hobbled vehicle. He swung across the lane and pulled up level with the car, nose to nose. Not safe by a long shot, but it was late and they wouldn’t be long. 

The front bumper was gnarled and twisted, the grille tufted with dirt and grit and feathery, blood-spattered hair. They got out together and went up close to look, moving timidly as if the car itself was some beast felled in battle. 

“I looked up,” Nix said again. “Right at the last second. And you know, all I could think was how dusty it was, just this awful sound, like a bomb going off, and this cloud of dust. She was big.”

“She?” 

“I don’t know. I’m guessing. No antlers that I could see.” 

The windshield was a ruin, the glass shattered like a star. Dick daydreamed Nix’s head against it and felt his mouth fill suddenly with spit, a nauseating prelude.

“Shit,” he said again. 

“I wish you’d stop saying that,” Nix muttered. 

I wish you’d stop dashing yourself against the rocks any chance you get, Dick thought. You’d have been that deer if you could. 

There was a noise in the bushes, a futile scrape that rose and fell and rose again. They looked at each other. They knew what it was; the question now was only whether or not they’d go and look at it. 

The night was impossibly dark outside the dual streams of the headlights, but Dick had a torch in the back of the Ford. He fetched it out and they tromped together into the weeds. 

Dick had seen men fall in battle, more than he could count, and he’d seen dead animals too. The difference was the clothing; when soldiers fell they were clad in cotton, in wool, so even in death they stood a chance of looking soft, and to glance at them you stood a chance of pretending them into repose. The doe’s body was unmistakably broken, and she kicked at the grass with legs at terrible angles, flailed about with a spine that didn’t quite function. Her eyes rolled in her head, and Dick realized with a mundane kind of horror that whatever brain she’d had to start with still worked, and it seemed obscene that she should have lain here for as long as it took Nix to walk home, that she should still be breathing. 

“God,” Nix said. He had his hand over his mouth. 

“Do you--do you have something in the car? A pistol, or--” 

“No,” Nix said. He leaned down as though addressing the animal at their feet. “I’m sorry.” 

Dick hefted the torch in his hands, testing its weight. As they watched the doe convulsed, a ripple from top to toe, a body’s last gasp. Foul-smelling liquid issued from her mouth and from beneath her tail, black as oil in the poor light. She settled into it and stilled, one final indignity. 

Dick let his hands fall to his sides. He shifted to his right just slightly, a half-step, nothing more. If Dick looked down he’d see Nix’s left hand hanging pale and white in the darkness. If Dick looked down he’d see Nix’s hand and that dead deer beyond it. He took Nix’s hand without looking, and they stood in the night together. 

***

The whole week after the debacle with the car the two of them went around gingerly, Nix seeming bruised and Dick loath to prod where he didn’t strictly need to. Now and then he’d find himself thinking that maybe Nix would benefit from a little pain, but when he got up alongside the possibility he’d think of Nix on the roadside, or of the way he’d put his hand on his daughter’s cheek as she slept, and it was both simpler and more appealing to instead offer some small comfort. 

“You going to buy something new?” he asked Nix one morning on the drive into work. 

From the passenger seat Nix patted the glovebox as if he felt he needed to make something up to the Ford. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. He shot a look at Dick. “I think we might manage with the one for awhile. Unless--” 

Dick shook his head. “That’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m thinking of going home to visit sometime, but I can take the train. And I’ll make Ann chauffeur me once I get there.” 

Nix smiled absently. “She’ll love that. When are you going?” 

“Still thinking about it,” Dick said, feeling as if he ought to emphasize the thinking. “Depends on when you think you can spare me. From work,” he added. 

“Sure,” said Nix. “Oh, any time. I wouldn’t keep you.” 

“You’re not,” Dick said, but no, that didn’t seem right, did it. He figured he’d quit while he was ahead, and anyway, here they were at the nitration works. 

He spoke to his parents on Saturdays, mostly in the morning, mostly before Nix got up. He wasn’t hiding, not exactly. But Nix had a thoughtful way of taking up residence at the kitchen table, watchfully, as if he wanted to seize the telephone and swear up and down Dick had come to New Jersey of his own free will. The sight made Dick’s hair stand on end for reasons he couldn’t quite figure. 

“They must think I’m a real heel, spiriting you off up here,” Nix said to him one day, after he’d hung up with his mother. 

“I’m in New Jersey, Lewis,” Dick said. “Not on the moon. It’s not exactly a trek to and fro.” 

Nix had shrugged. “Even so,” he said. “You were barely home before you moved again. It’s not lost on me, is what I’m trying to say.” 

Dick thought of those blue winter mornings he’d spent at home, the stretching sense of time he remembered and how ready he’d been to leave it behind. He looked askance at Nix’s chronic fractiousness around his family, but he couldn’t exactly lay claim to perfect ease himself. 

“It’s not lost on me either,” he said finally. “I chose it, after all.” 

Nix nodded at that, but Dick still thought he looked skeptical. He didn’t guess it could be helped, and besides, the thought of attempting to convince Nix made Dick cognizant of an entire set of promises he found himself wanting to make even as he knew that doing so was at best madness and at worst a lie. 

So he let Nix brood and told himself everything would all shake out the way it was meant to, so long as he put his head down and did his best. At work he thought he was beginning to make sense of things; they’d hired that first foreman he and Nix had interviewed, the mechanic from the Army Air Force, and he’d been getting along. Some of the men had taken to waving Dick over in the canteen at the lunch hour, and on the days he didn’t sit and eat in Nix’s office or outside on a bench he’d sit with them while they ate their sandwiches and drank their coffee and gossiped.

“I heard the old man’s thinking of closing the place,” one said. “No more dough in nitration, see. It’s all acetate now.”

“Acetate, no kidding. There anything to that, you think, Mr. Winters?” 

Dick would always smile and say he couldn’t say, and hadn’t he told them to call him Dick? And they’d laugh and bluster and say _sure, Dick_ and by the next time he came and sat with them they’d be back to formality again. All these men with twenty-some years on him, big and burly with noses red from drink. There were younger men too, who moved around the veterans with a skittishness Dick could understand if not personally indulge. 

Nix never came down to the canteen. He had his secretary’s coffee pot, after all, and the nips of whiskey he doctored his mugs with. After noon he didn’t bother doctoring anything at all, and it wasn’t out of the question to come upon him late in the day--as Dick had this afternoon--to find him the better part of drunk, especially now that Dick drove home. 

“Is it true your father’s thinking of closing the plant?” 

“Only in my wildest dreams, Dick. You think he’d spare me fifty-odd years behind this desk, when he had to white-knuckle it through before me? Not on your life.” 

Dick rolled his eyes. “Of course. It makes perfect sense he’d keep the whole operation afloat out of spite.” 

“You don’t know my father as well as I do. Or my grandfather, for that matter. You know my father hit a guy over the head with a hammer while he was at Yale? Almost killed him.” 

“Nix--”

“Just drunk and stupid. He was twenty. His life should’ve been over, but who are we kidding, he’s Lewis Nixon’s kid. So he holed up in a penthouse in the city and prayed to God the guy wouldn’t die, and he didn’t, and eventually everything just...went away.” 

Dick sank into the chair opposite Nix’s desk. “Wow.” 

“I mean, it went away legally,” Nix went on. “If you ask Lewis Senior and Stanhope it never went away. You’d better believe you’d prefer to take your punishment from the law than from my grandfather. If there was any question of Stanhope doing anything besides working here his whole life, it was answered the second he brought the hammer down on that poor undergraduate’s skull all those years ago. I hear he lives in a home upstate. Dad still pays his room and board.” 

“That can’t be true,” Dick said. 

“I wish it weren’t. But there you are, Dick. The Nixon legacy, written in blood and whiskey.” 

“You’re being awfully dramatic,” Dick said. 

“Well, I’m an awfully dramatic person,” Nix said. He yawned. “Christ, is it five o’clock yet?” 

Dick sighed. “Close enough,” he said. He took up Nix’s fountain pen--Montblanc; the pearly starburst inlaid on the top always reminded Dick of edelweiss--and capped it. “Let’s get you home before you put an eye out with this thing.” 

“Get me home,” Nix parroted. “God, I hate the way that sounds, like I’m in some sort of condition.” 

“Aren’t you?” 

“If I am, it’s damn near permanent.” Nix got up from the desk chair and stretched his arms languidly over his head, swaying a little on his feet. “Just like this place. Permanent and inevitable.” 

“Nothing’s permanent, Lew.” 

“Isn’t it?” 

Nix came around the desk then, came right up into Dick’s space in a way that couldn’t be misinterpreted. The office door was closed behind them but Dick felt a surveillant prickle between his shoulderblades anyway. Nix put his hand between the fronts of Dick’s suit jacket and laid his palm hotly on his waist, hung his other arm around Dick’s shoulder to draw him closer. His eyes were glazed and not quite bright enough. Seeing him this way made Dick think of Aldbourne, of the Nix they all used to watch out on the town at night, the lights in the pubs amber to match the beer Dick didn’t drink. 

Nixon and his girls, Harry used to say, and he’d look at Dick and shake his head. 

“Not here,” Dick said. 

Nix ignored him, bent his head and put his lips to Dick’s neck. 

Dick sucked in a breath. He was sure his pulse must have quickened tangibly; Nix’s tongue darted out to brand the place where it beat under Dick’s skin. Nix could seduce when he wanted to; he was better at it like this, actually, like he’d either forgotten who Dick was or remembered him more keenly. 

Dick pulled away. “I said, not here.” 

Nix stepped back. He turned away from Dick, toward the door. “Of course not,” he said. “Let’s go.”

***

On a Saturday Nix sat on the porch, legs hanging off the sides. “Those are coming along,” he said, nodding at the garden.

The corn was halfway up Dick’s thigh and spring green, which he was taking as a victory. Today he was weeding and putting up a trellis for peas. Nix was supervising, drink in hand; it was the kind of day and Nix was in the kind of mood that made the whiskey less of an albatross and more of a quirk, back the way it had been when it was just a host of bottles clanking about amongst Dick’s socks.

“Yeah,” Dick said of the fledgling plants. “I’m feeling good about their chances.” He reached up and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “And I don’t see it freezing again any time soon.” 

“You never know,” Nix said. “One year it snowed the first week in May.” 

Dick grinned up at him. “I remember that. Shut down the whole town back home; they’d decommissioned the plows for the season and they couldn’t salt the roads. It was a real--” 

“Clusterfuck?” 

“You might say. I was going to call it a snafu.” 

“Mm. Now you sound like an enlisted man. Rough and tumble, you know. Not entirely unappealing.” 

Dick laughed, and rubbed at the back of his neck where the skin felt hottest. 

“You’re blushing,” said Nix, voice low. 

“I’m getting sunburned,” Dick said, louder, ignoring the undercurrent between them. “If you’d get off your rear end and give me a hand, I wouldn’t be out here roasting at high noon.” 

“First of all, it’s three o’clock. Second of all, no thank you. I’ve got a black thumb. You don’t want me any closer to those plants than I am right now.” 

“I don’t know. Seems like you could grow something or other if you put your mind to it.” Dick squinted into the shade and let the words hang a moment. 

Nix narrowed his eyes. “Are you flirting with me?” 

“I’m gardening,” Dick said. 

Nix shook his head and quaffed his drink in one go. “Uh huh. You any closer to finishing up?” 

“Give it an hour or so,” Dick said. “I’ve got to train these peas.” 

“Jesus.” Nix clambered to his feet. He held up his glass. “I’m getting another of these. You train your goddamn peas and then get back to me, won’t you?” He turned and tramped toward the house. He paused at the threshold and ducked back out the door. “Want some water?” 

“I’ll be in,” Dick said. 

He made short work of the trellis, letting his mind wander as he did so that when he was finished he wasn’t sure if an hour had passed, or fifteen minutes, or two. When he stood at last he thought the sun was further overhead, a wedge of migratory blue shade slicing from the porch to the back yard. Inside, the house was cool and velvety with shadow. He went into the kitchen. There was still sun coming through the windows over the sink; he blinked into the clear light as he filled a glass from the faucet, stood at the counter and drained it. A creaky step on the floorboard behind him, and then Nix’s chin came to rest on Dick’s shoulder. 

“Hi,” he said. 

“Hey.” 

“You done with the peas?” 

Dick smiled. “For now.” 

“Good,” said Nix, and he set to kissing a lazy asymptote from Dick’s collarbone to his jaw. 

Dick shivered. “I need a shower first,” he said. 

“I’ll survive.” 

Dick let his head drop sideways acquiescently. When he couldn’t stand it any longer he turned in Nix’s arms and found his mouth, let himself be backed against the countertop. Nix netted him either side, one arm catching him around the waist, other hand yanking Dick’s tee shirt free of its tuck. Waiting had made Nix greedy, and as he got his way Dick couldn’t help but marvel at his surety. He knew by now that if he scratched across Dick’s ribs just so a mark would come up along the path of his fingers like a chalky pink hopscotch line; he knew that the pale flesh of Dick’s belly was softer after months of peace and diner pie; he knew that while he undid Dick’s fly one button at a time Dick would cover his face with his hand and groan as if in pain but that it only meant _please_.

“You’re very industrious,” Nix said, his hand inside Dick’s shorts now. “Makes a guy feel downright lazy by comparison.” 

Dick gasped. “You could make it up to me.” 

“See,” said Nix. “I knew you were flirting before.” 

“I was not. Don’t know how.” 

“Bullshit,” Nix said, looking down between them, fiddling with his own fly. “You’re a natural.” 

***

“I was thinking,” Dick said. They were in the bathtub, the air thick with vapor, the mirror fogged a dark, spumy grey. Dick liked the bathroom, with the big, imposing clawfoot in whose belly they sat now, back to front. Idly he slopped the washcloth out of the bathwater and drew it across Nix’s shoulders. 

“You’ve been doing a lot of that lately,” Nix said. “Should I be worried?” 

Dick poked him in the side and Nix squirmed. Water sheeted down his back from the cloth. They’d been in a long time; Dick was waterlogged and pale, his fingertips long ago pruned, but they lingered anyway, running the tap again and again, the water around them growing milky with soap.

“I was thinking I might go home before Harry’s wedding. I could take the train to Wilkes-Barre and meet you.” He took a breath. “I thought it might look--” 

“Yeah,” Nix said. He laughed softly. “Might look better, huh.” 

Dick slid forward in the tub so he was flush with Nix’s back. He dragged his lips over Nix’s skin, where there was a freckle he liked to make his target. He hooked his chin over Nix’s shoulder and set a hand on his thigh, the hair there coarse. “That’s not exactly what I meant,” he said. 

“Except it was,” said Nix. “It’s all right. I take your point. It’s probably best not to turn up looking quite so much like an old married couple.” 

Dick smiled in spite of himself. “Is that what we are?” 

“I’m not sure we argue enough.” 

“Don’t we?” 

“Trust me, we don’t. Of course, I’m only speaking from my own experience. But you’re just slightly more tolerant than Kathy, so maybe personality’s a factor.” 

“Maybe you’ve improved,” Dick said. “Ever think of that?” 

Nix scoffed. “You saw the way she looked at me.” 

Dick shook his head. “Kathy’s not--” 

He stopped. He wasn’t sure precisely what he’d been about to say. Kathy’s not the one who matters, said his gut, but that line of thinking was predicated on assumptions Dick wasn’t sure whether or not to make. Sometimes he wanted to ask Nix if he thought he’d get married again. Sometimes he saw a girl pass by on the street who made him look twice, and that in turn made him feel bad, and that bad feeling made him wonder. In the bathtub now he felt suddenly fearful. They’d get out, towel off and go about their days and away into the future, to who knew where. Together, or not. Friends, or whatever they were besides. 

Nix was distracted, slow beneath the weight of a whiskey afternoon, refractory following their interlude downstairs, and Dick was glad for it. 

“What were you saying?” he asked. 

“Oh, nothing much,” Dick said. “Just talking.” 

“Well, if I don’t get out of here I’m going to shrivel up,” Nix said. 

Dick watched his muscles bunch and shift as he rose from the bath, a small rainfall heralding his exit. He went over to the toilet and pissed, and Dick looked away, pretending the trickle from the faucet’s mouth was all he heard. He wasn’t squeamish about bodily mundanities; war precluded preciousness on that score. Still, the casual intimacy struck him now in ways it never had back then. He tried to think of Nix using the toilet in front of Kathy and couldn’t manage it. He’d have been inclined to preen if it hadn’t seemed such a bizarre point of pride, and childish besides. He clenched his teeth and pulled the stopper from the drain. 

In the bedroom he sat on the edge of the mattress in his bathrobe. He watched Nix dress, underwear and undershirt and pants. Finally he turned around and regarded Dick, frowning. 

“Are you alright?” Nix asked. “You were quiet in the tub just now. And you were thinking of something, don’t say you weren’t.” 

“Sure,” Dick said. “I’m fine. I was just thinking about Harry,” he lied. “What we ought to get them as a present. It’d help if we knew Kitty better, I guess.” 

“I can ask Blanche her opinion at dinner tomorrow,” Nix said. “Say, why don’t you come along? Shore me up against Stanhope. Give him the latest from the shop floor. He likes to hear from the little people now and again, so long as it’s on his own terms and sufficiently lubricated. With booze, Dick, don’t be crass.” 

Dick had given no indication he thought otherwise, but of course Nix knew that. All at once Dick felt better. He kicked at Nix’s pants-leg with his bare foot and said he’d go. 

“Good. Blanche has been asking after you, anyway. If I didn’t know better I’d say she was looking to get her hooks in you herself.” 

“I’d bore her to death,” Dick said. 

“Oh, I don’t know,” Nix said. “You’re not so boring.” 

“You trying to fix me up with your sister, Lew?” 

“Hardly,” Nix said, but he made a peculiar choking noise along with the word that told Dick he’d been thinking of it, for whatever reason. “I just don’t like hearing you sell yourself short,” he said, reminding Dick uncomfortably of himself all those times he was bound and determined to bear Nix up, as if words could undo whatever wormwood tangle he had inside of him, stuck fast to his heart like a burr. 

***

The following evening they had dinner at Stanhope Nixon’s apartment in the city, a place Nix referred to as a pied-à-terre, implying a certain sense of the diminutive Dick found altogether lacking in reality. When they came into the front room Blanche was there to greet them as if she were the lady of the house, dressed in lilac and cradling a drink already. She leaned in to peck Dick on the cheek. 

“So, Lewis,” she said when she’d withdrawn to hug her brother. “I hear you’re shirking your paternal duties these days.” 

Nix shrank from her embrace like a wilting plant. “Word travels fast. Who’d you hear that from? Mom, or straight from the horse’s mouth?” 

“Oh, I forget,” she said. “One of the two, anyway. So, is it true? Not that I’d be surprised, exactly, but--” 

Nix let his eyes fall shut; Dick watched his shoulders square up as if he’d seen something coming, some collision he couldn’t avoid, and true to her part Blanche had a look like the headlight of a steam engine. Dick hadn’t figured on derailing a train tonight, but he guessed it was probably about the same as a parachute landing, which was to say rib-cracking and potentially fatal, depending on how you hit. 

“Give him a break, would you?” Dick said. 

Blanche looked up, and Nix along with her. They looked as if they weren’t quite sure who had spoken. Blanche fixed him with a long and appraising look, and for a moment he felt sure he’d be skewered with some remark or other. Perhaps she’d go so far as to accuse him of the truth; in the chiaroscuro of the hallway her look seemed canny enough. But instead she set her mouth in a cool smile, the foe well within her ability to vanquish but hardly worth the effort. 

“Why not,” was all she said. She glided past Dick into the dining room, calling for her father as she went. “Daddy! Come and say hello to Lewis and his houseguest.” 

They were alone then, just for a moment. Nix had a look on his face that was equal parts gratitude and bluster. “I’m used to her,” he said. 

“I know you are,” Dick said. “I’m sorry. It bothered me.” 

“Don’t apologize. But don’t let her get under your skin if she decides to try.” 

“I thought she liked me,” Dick said. 

“She does like you. Hell, she likes me, too, but she can’t resist. And anyway, I deserve it.”

“Lew--” 

He patted Dick on the arm. “Forget about it. Come on into the heart of darkness.”

The elder Nixon’s dining room was every bit as imposing as Dick had imagined, all dark woods and fine china and spindly silver candlesticks. The place had a perfumed, considered air that made Dick want to cast about for the lady of the house, although of course she was gone. There was a cook, though, a bustling woman who moved about the place with the familiarity bred of years of presiding over this kitchen, and a man thin and wan as a sliver of almond who served the food. 

“Soupe d’ asperges,” he said, setting a bowl of creamy green liquid in front of Dick. 

“Merci,” Dick said reflexively. 

Across the table, Blanche snorted. “He’s from Buffalo,” she said. “Aren’t you, Jackson?” 

The man said nothing, and Dick concentrated on his soup. 

“You pick up French in the service, Winters?” Stanhope dragged his bread through a pat of butter molded in the shape of a flower. 

“Oh, bits and pieces,” Dick said. “I’ve got nothing on Lew here, though.” 

“I should hope not,” said Stanhope. “I didn’t put him through a year at _lycée_ in Paris to get shown up by you. No offense.” 

Dick grinned tightly to show none was taken, feeling rather than seeing Nix shoot him a look from across the table. “Well, he won’t be. Was it just the year in Paris?” he asked, knowing full well it was, that after Paris had been Los Angeles. One city of light to another, and neither of which had seemed to Nix to be the right kind. But Dick had never seen Nix in Paris, or in California, so he had to take his word for it. 

“That’s right. Blanche took to it like a duck to water.” 

Dick looked across at Nix. “And you?” 

“Lewis was so moody that year,” Blanche said, taking a neat bite of soup. “That’s all I remember, the way he’d hang about the apartment moping.” 

“I didn’t mope.” 

“You did. You and that boy who was always skulking around with you, Guillaume or something. His mother was a French movie star, Dick, it was all terribly glamourous. But you’d never have known it to look at the two of them. They were both so serious, always up in Lewis’s room with their books. Lew, do you remember, he had those round little glasses? And a nose like a bird’s.” 

She laughed, having delighted herself. She looked dreamy, as if she was halfway back there, and she smiled at her brother and at Dick like she’d forgotten she was supposed to be angry. 

Stanhope was looking between them, one hand gripping his soup spoon. “That boy always looked ill,” he said finally. “I think eventually they sent him to a sanatorium.” 

Nix served himself another generous pour of red, finishing off the bottle and letting the dregs leach into his glass. “I’ll go and fetch another one of these,” he said, pushing his chair back from the table and grabbing the empty bottle by the neck even as his father told him not to bother, that Jackson could see to it as soon as he served the lamb. 

After dinner Nix traded his wine glass for his habitual Vat 69 and fished his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. They’d drifted from the dining room into the adjacent parlour, Stanhope begging off for the evening, Blanche curled on the divan with her cheek pillowed on her elbow. 

“I’m going too,” she said. “In just a minute.” 

Nix jerked his head in the direction of the balcony, and Dick was helpless to do anything but follow. The night was cool for the season, and Dick frowned to think about his corn. 

“What’s that look?” Nix muttered around the end of his smoke. 

“Nothing,” Dick said. “Just thinking about the weather.” 

“Right,” Nix said. “So, you want to ask me?” 

“Ask you what?” 

“Whether he was my lover. In Paris. Whether we messed around up in my bedroom when he was supposed to be helping me with my grammar.” 

“What? No. I--I hadn’t even thought about it.” 

Nix shook his head, held the cigarette aside and gulped from his glass. “You wouldn’t,” he said. 

“Should I have?” 

Dick didn’t wait for an answer; he went to the railing and leaned hard against it so the wrought iron bit securely into his chest. The lights glittered out all around them, and in their center the lacuna of the park like a dark jewel in its setting. If he tried not to hear the traffic he could almost look past those lights altogether, stare off into the dark and think about home, not of Lancaster but of the old house before they moved into town, the way the front yard had melted into the fields into the woods into the endless rolling nocturne of the countryside.

Nix sighed out a cloud of smoke. “Well, he wasn’t,” he said. “But he was a good kid, and my friend when I didn’t have a ton of them. And my father was right, he was sick all the time. They sent him off to some hospital in the Alps a couple months before we left. We were going to write each other,” he said. “You know what kids say. But we didn’t. I thought about him over there sometimes, thought I might come across him after Normandy. Stupid, right?” 

“Not really,” Dick said, leaning into Nix’s shoulder as he came to lean on the railing beside him. “I had friends like that at camp. You think you’ll know each other forever when you’re kids. Time seems…” 

“Immaterial,” said Nix. 

“Very poetic, Lew.” 

“I do my best. But look at you, you wrote to DeEtta the whole war.” 

“Not the whole war.” 

“Still,” Nix said. “You ever think there was something there?” 

Dick shrugged. “Maybe a long time ago.” 

And that was a child’s game too, to think you’d marry the first girl you did much more than ignore, the first girl you could talk to. Dick still wasn’t sure that wasn’t what love was, just to be able to talk to someone. But he thought of the last year or so they’d written, the way things had changed. Subtly at first then all at once, when they’d both had to admit neither quite recognized the other in those carefully written pages. The span of time between their letters had stretched out on both ends. When at last she alluded to a young man she’d met at home Dick found himself relieved not to have to come back and reconcile the version of himself who’d scraped all those words together with whoever he was now. 

Nix flicked his cigarette off the balcony. “Come on,” he said. “Blanche will kill us if we let her spend the night on the sofa.”

***

The first good thing Dick saw when he got off the train at Lancaster was Ann’s skinny arm waving crazily out the driver’s side window of their father’s car. He jogged to the edge of the curb to meet her, threw the passenger door open and his bag inside. 

“Officer, I’d like to report an underage driver.” 

“Oh, hush up,” she said. “You’re lucky I didn’t make you walk home. I’m missing band practice, you know.” She pulled off the curb, hands at ten and two and checking both her mirrors. Dick had never been such a careful driver. 

“Made first clarinet yet?” 

She groaned. “I sound like a dying chicken. It’s only that in marching band the crowd yells too loud for it to matter. Anyway, I think I’ve had enough. Mom doesn’t want me to quit, though, she says it’s good for me to learn perseverance or something.” She rubbed at her nose and gave a long sniff, either hay fever or commentary on their mother’s choice of object lesson. 

“She’s right,” Dick said, only half joking.

She gave him a whip-quick smack on the arm without taking her eyes off the road. “Keep talking,” she said. “You can still shake a leg all over town, I don’t have to drive you.” 

“Who said anything about you driving?” 

She rolled her eyes. “You’ll have to pry the keys from my cold, dead hands. Or Dad’s, I guess. Anyway, where’s your car? Don’t say you wrecked it already.” 

Dick winced out the window to think of how near she’d come to the real story. “No,” he said. “Lew had a bit of a mishap with his own car, though, so I lent him mine.”

“Lew,” she said, rolling the syllable around in her mouth. “Is he nice?” 

“Sure he is. Why do you ask?” 

“It’s a nice name, is all,” she said. “Lew.” 

“Yeah,” Dick said. “I guess so.” 

Dick loved Nix’s name, loved the way it felt to say it every time he did: like a graduation, like a secret. Even now to hold those three letters in his head inspired a particular sort of thrill, one that set his palms to sweating. For Ann to say she liked it made him feel as if he’d shown a visitor around, brought them to his favorite place and heard them say, _it’s beautiful._

“How’s school?” he asked, because he couldn’t sit with her in his father’s car and feel those things for any stretch of time. 

“School’s fine.” 

“How’s math?” 

“Ugh,” she said, and he laughed. Ann went on. “But we’re dissecting frogs in science next week. Marjorie says she’s going to protest, that it’s cruel, but I’m kind of looking forward to it, and Tommy said he thinks I’m a weirdo but I told him where he could go--” 

“Ann!” 

“Well, I did, and he deserved it.” 

“You still like all that stuff, then. Science, bugs and snakes and things.” 

She’d nearly been the death of his mother once. All Dick seemed to hear about when he was away at school was Ann’s latest scrape and his mother’s apparent inability to cope. Yet she’d kept on, and so had Ann. Apparently she’d grown up all right, snakes and snails and all. 

Ann shrugged. “Sure, it’s okay.” 

“You don’t let this Tommy tell you anything about it.” 

“No, jeez.” She stopped talking after that and they made the rest of the drive in a mostly companionable silence, though Dick got the impression that was contingent on any further prying. 

At home his mother was in the kitchen; she held a dishrag in her hands and looked expectant, as if she’d been caught looking out the window for them. When Dick saw her he wanted to feel soft, to feel something for her in person all those Saturday phone calls had missed. 

“Mom,” he said, and went over to her. She smelled the same as ever, that faint perfume that never quite corresponded to the little bottle she kept on her dresser. When Dick was a boy he’d buried his face in her neck when he got upset, and when he did he always felt something inside him still. He cast about for that same quietude now, and when he didn’t feel it he was unsurprised. 

_Maybe you’ve improved. Ever think of that?_ Wouldn’t count on it, was what Nix would say, and Dick decided he had to agree. 

“How was your trip?” she asked. 

“Fine,” he said. 

“And work?” 

He laughed. “I’m on vacation,” he said. “But no, work’s fine. I suppose it’s nice to get away.” 

He hadn’t thought twice about the plant since he’d had Nix drop him at the station on his way in. Another version of Dick might have made the trip down Friday evening, or gotten up early Saturday to have the weekend at home. But the front of the station was jammed with Monday travelers; there hadn’t been much in the way of a goodbye, and that made Dick glad to have stayed in Nixon. 

“Well, you know we’re happy to have you. Ann, go and make up your brother’s bed.” 

Ann had just pulled a bottle of milk from the refrigerator, and Dick didn’t miss the look on her face before she set it on the counter and turned around. “It’s all right,” he said. “I know where the linen cupboard is. Unless you’ve gone and renovated while I was away.” 

His mother sighed. “No,” she said. 

He got the idea there was something happening between the two of them, something he was missing. He frowned. “Then I can manage myself. But I will take a glass of that milk if you’re pouring,” he added in Ann’s direction. 

Ann nodded and retrieved a pair of glasses. She poured the milk and leaned over the counter to fish something out of the great ceramic jar that had sat out as long as Dick could remember, stocking the fruits of his mother’s oven. Ann pulled out a cookie and jammed it in her mouth, freeing her hand up to grab a second, which she carried dutifully over to Dick without bothering to remove the first from between her teeth. 

“Thanks,” Dick said. 

“Mmm.” 

“Oh, Ann, get a plate. And look at the two of you; you’ll ruin your dinner.” 

“Dinner’s not for hours,” Dick said, and Ann grinned at him around the cookie. 

Upstairs his room was just the way he’d left it, the mattress bare and draped in a sheet. Back at the farmhouse mice tended to stray into rooms left empty too long; old habits must die hard, the same way Dick had to untuck his tie most mornings and still polished his shoes to shining, always half on the lookout for one of Sobel’s surprise inspections. He fetched a stack of sheets from the linen closet and made short work of his bed, finishing off with the quilt he well remembered huddling under at Christmas time, watching snow drift down out the window and thinking about what Nix was doing. 

“Hi,” Ann said from the doorway.

“Hi,” said Dick. “You don’t have to hover out there, you know.” 

“It’s just strange, I guess,” she said. “You being home. I don’t know whether or not you’re a guest.” 

“Look, you don’t have to fetch me things, or make my bed. I suppose you can if you want to, but--” 

She laughed, and came in and sat beside him on the bed. She kicked her shoes off and folded her legs up, set her chin down on her knees. “I missed you,” she said. “I guess you were always going to leave, but it’s as if you missed everything along the way before you did.” 

“You’re only saying that because I’m gone. If I were here, kicking up a fuss about what radio programs to listen to, giving you the third degree about your friends? You’d beg me to pack my bags. Heck, I’d probably have the car. Can you imagine?” 

“No.” She giggled, and leaned against him. “Do you suppose you’ll ever come back?” she asked. 

“Hey, I expect this line of questioning from Mom, not from you.” 

“You can practice your answer this way,” she said. 

Dick sighed. “Sure,” he said. “One day, I guess I will.” The words made him feel uneasy, the way he felt when he thought about making any promise these days. “Say, have you kept up with the Barneses’ lodger at all? Eileen?” 

Ann looked at him sideways, eyebrow raised like she knew exactly what he was doing. “We’ve written a little,” she said, taking the bait obligingly enough. “She’s back in London. But the last letter I sent came back looking like it had been through a grinder, so I guess I’ll wait til I hear from her again with a new address.” 

“I could write the Barneses if you want me to,” Dick said. 

“Sure, if you think about it.” 

“I’ve thought of going back to see them,” Dick said. “Not for awhile; I’m not sure I--well, it seems like it might be better to wait. But I think I’d like to see Aldbourne as a sleepy little place, the way it was before we showed up and ran all over the place. Stop in and have tea. Maybe surprise them, if I didn’t think Mrs. Barnes would hate it. Might mistake me for a prowler and clock me over the head with a broom or something, knowing her. She was spry.” 

“That’s what Eileen always said. I’d like to go with you,” Ann said. “If you did go.” 

“I’d take you. It’s beautiful. Not just England, but all of it. The Alps--you should’ve seen the countryside.” 

“Prettier than Lancaster County?” 

“Well, let’s not go wild,” Dick said, grinning. “But it’s got a lot to recommend it.” 

“I’d like to go to Paris,” she said dreamily. 

“I went to Paris on a weekend pass,” he said. “I took one heck of a bubble bath.” 

She laughed at him, and he laughed too, mainly because the memory was inextricable from Nix somehow and that made Dick happy but also because it felt good to sit and talk with her about it, to be far enough removed that getting so het up over hot clean water seemed appropriately ridiculous. 

(In New Jersey Dick bought a tin of very fine shaving soap, the cost of which he tried hard to banish from memory. He squared it with himself by thinking of how much he’d have paid for a proper shave and a haircut in Bastogne or Haguenau and dividing it out to get a cost-per-use he could live with. He told all this to Nix once, and he responded by going out immediately to buy Dick three extra tins and a fancy new shaving kit besides, and said if Dick was very good he’d give up the cost as a deathbed confession but not before.)

“I’ve got another trial run for you,” Ann said. “Because she’s been practicing this one too. Have you got a girl?” 

He ran a hand over his face. “No girl,” he said. 

“Too bad,” Ann said, her mouth forming an inscrutable moue. “She’ll be disappointed. Although maybe she’ll figure you’ll move home sooner if there’s no girl. You still hear from DeEtta?” 

“Last I heard she had a fellow. What are you plotting?” 

She groaned and let herself fall backwards on the bed. The drama of the moment reminded Dick of something Nix might do. 

“Only trying to get Mom off my neck,” Ann continued. “She doesn’t like Tommy, and I can’t tell if it’s him or the idea of him or both, and anyway I’d be much obliged if you’d find yourself a girl and move back home and marry her and take some of the heat off.” 

“Easy as pie,” Dick said. “I’ll get right on it.” 

“Thanks,” said Ann, and cast her gaze back up to the ceiling. She seemed to watch something up there for a long time, the light changing or some small movement. Dick watched her face until he felt strange staring, and then he told her he was going downstairs and she blinked at him, got up off the bed and wandered from the room herself. 

“I’ve got homework,” she said, leaning on the bannister. “I’ll be down.” 

“What’s dinner, do you know?” 

Ann shrugged. “Meatloaf,” she said. “Your favorite.” She drummed her fingers on the wood. “It’s good to see you, Dick.” 

He could remember being a teenager, he thought. He couldn’t remember anything like this. “Yeah,” he said to her retreating back. “You too.” 

At the dinner table Dick ate two helpings of meatloaf. He begged off a third, though his mother said he looked too thin, her habitual lie. He sipped coffee and wondered when he could go to bed and read. 

“I’d like a word,” said his father, when Ann had been dragged up to help with the dishes. 

“Sure,” Dick said, picked up his mug and followed Richard Sr. into the living room. He sat in the sofa and wiped his palms off on his thighs, and for a moment Dick thought something bad had happened. 

“What is it?” 

“Your mother’d kill me for saying this,” his father said. “But deep down she knows--both of us know--a man’s got to make his own way. Now, I know you’ve got this job in New Jersey, and who knows, you might be looking to lay down roots there.” 

Dick guessed that was his roundabout way of asking about a girl. He just nodded, shrugged his shoulders. Who knows, maybe. 

“But I remember what you asked me when you joined up,” his father went on. “And I’ve kept an eye out for you. These were all still on the market as of last week. I made a few phone calls. Didn’t bring it up at Christmas,” he said. “It didn’t seem the right time.” 

Here he drew a folded sheet of yellow legal paper from his shirt pocket and passed it over. On the sheet was a series of scrawled addresses, acreages and brief notations the better for the reader to keep them straight. White house. South-facing, good light. Cherry trees. The second listing had been embellished with a ballpoint star. 

“Take a look if you’re interested. The one out on Wright Road’s the real steal if you want my opinion. Pretty house, in good solid shape. Fields look good. If you’re still looking.” 

“Yeah, of course. Thanks.” Dick folded and refolded the piece of paper, finally slipping it inside his own shirt pocket where he continued to be aware of its presence as if it bore some innate light or temperature. 

“I could’ve snapped up one or two along the way,” said Richard Sr. “I thought about it, and you’d sent the money. But I figured you’d be better off making your own decisions when you got back.” 

Some men might’ve been scared off by the thought of tempting fate, of buying a farm and cursing it to lie fallow in wait for a young farmer who’d never return. But more than likely Dick’s father had let plain old practicality stay his hand instead. Why buy a place you’d only have to sell again later, in the event it went unclaimed? His parents and Ann were townsfolk now, his father had a bad back that acted up when the weather turned. No, better to wait. Better to be sensible about it. Dick decided he’d have been disturbed by anything different. 

“I’d like your opinion,” Dick said. “If you’ve got some time to go and take a look.” 

“Go and see for yourself first,” said his father. “See what you think.” 

The next morning Dick slipped into a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, a pair of sneakers. He slipped from the house just as easily, the eastern sky peachy behind the trees. The day around him felt heavy with moisture already, dew clinging in a silvery haze, soaking his socks as he crossed the grass to the sidewalk. He set off at a relaxed pace, letting his muscles shake free of sleep and his head remain empty of thought save a rhythmic accounting of the slap of his shoes on asphalt. He’d gone too long without doing this; he was getting soft, and not only in the gut. His mind was no longer steeled for physical hurts, and he found himself distinctly grumpier about a few miles of gently rolling hills than he’d ever been about Currahee. 

He hadn’t exactly meant to end up at the farm, but he did anyway. He knew the road, remembered passing it by in the old days, and when he came upon the hand-lettered “For Sale” sign past the place where the town ebbed away he slowed to a walk down a dirt road hemmed by trees on either side, bramble choking the stone wall that had carved property from countryside for who knew how long. Nobody lived here, though the place was in good enough repair. Maybe they’d moved to town like Dick’s family had; maybe some farmer had breathed his last in peace in a dusty bedroom, or maybe the man meant to build a life here left it thousands of miles away in France, in Italy, on some vine-choked island beyond the reach of Dick’s geography. He didn’t like to be so morbid. He didn’t think it got a person anywhere. But he found he couldn’t help it, not here on the cusp of the rest of his life. An occupational hazard, maybe, of a position he no longer held. 

The farmhouse was small. It had been smaller once, a Federal stone cube later occupants saw fit to enlarge with clean white clapboard and shutters painted blue. There was a lilac bush encroaching on the porch, nodding with blooms. The front door was unlocked, and Dick felt only the smallest twinge of unrest as he opened it and went inside. There was nobody around to fault him for trespassing, and besides, he reasoned, he was a potential buyer. The house was empty of furniture; Dick could still see the places the light had faded the hardwoods around the edges of the living room, where the rugs hadn’t quite met the wall. He wandered through to the kitchen, looked out the window across a field down to the treeline. 

He turned and went upstairs, the staircase a vestige of the oldest part of the house, rough-hewn and cramped. Off the landing he found a child’s room, wallpapered in pink, the remains of a comic strip affixed illicitly to the wall. In a corner lay the dessicated corpse of a brown bat he couldn’t resist prodding with the toe of his shoe. 

He stooped back downstairs and in the kitchen again, returned to the window and leaned in close to the glass so the frame diminished to a blur on the periphery. Again he looked at the treeline. I’m in my kitchen, he thought, trying the idea on for size. It’s summer, there’ll be a thunderstorm this afternoon, the kids are playing with a hose out front. 

As he stood and pretended himself into a future his chest began to swell with longing that matched the spirit of his present fantasies if not the content. The incongruity made him turn from the window and lean against the counter. He let his eyes fall closed against the light. His shirt was damp with sweat; here in the shade was beginning to feel chilled. 

_I need a shower first._

_I’ll live._

Dick opened his eyes again. 

Here’s where he’d stand and pour his drink; he’d keep a dry bar stocked in the sitting room and I’d make him hide it all when Mom came over. We’d take that first bedroom at the top of the stairs; big maple in the yard keeps it shady when it’s hot out, blocks the light so he can sleep in. He says he knows his way around horses but a cow might be pushing it. Bookshelves along the wall, we’d sit and read in the evenings and sometimes I’d fall asleep, wake up with the book on the floor with a crick in my neck. We’d have everyone around for Christmas. 

We’d get a dog. 

Dick left the house neater than he’d found it, kicking a collection of dried leaves from the interior of the porch just to say he had. For in the breadth of the moment he’d begun to feel house-proud, a steward of this little farm that wouldn’t be theirs. He went back out onto the road, feet crunching on the gravel. On the return journey his head felt crowded, and he ran until all he could think of was the burn of his pumping legs, the sting of sweat in his eyes and the thunk of his heart. 

Later his father asked about the house. He was on his way in for dinner, standing in the dining room doorway sorting the mail. He didn’t look at Dick as he spoke. “You go by any of those places today?” 

Dick sighed. He sat at his place already; he’d been writing a letter to Mrs. Barnes on the nostalgic strength of his conversation with Ann, and now he folded it and slid it into his shirt pocket. “I did,” he said. “One of them. I’m going to think about it.” 

“There’ll be others,” his father said with a shrug. “Here or somewhere else. When you’re ready.”

“Sure,” Dick said. 

***

The phone screamed in the middle of the night. Dick was out of bed and half out the door before he quite registered what he was hearing. Maybe he’d expected a call every night, with the same shifting ratio of hope to fear that had him scrambling downstairs for the receiver before the whole house woke up. Two longs and a short--he thought it was their ring. He couldn’t quite remember, but he answered with breathless familiarity anyway. 

“Hi,” he said. The line was quiet a moment. “Hello?” 

“Midnight calisthenics, Dick? That’s a new low.” 

“You can’t call here at this hour,” Dick said, biting his lip to keep back a smile Nix couldn’t even see. 

“You answered.” 

“You woke me up. It’s a party line, Nix, anyone could--” 

“I get it, I get it.” Nix’s voice was slow; he might have been sleeping himself. “Pleasant dreams, though?” 

Dick tried to imagine him nursing a glass of whiskey, book on his lap. Tonight would have been a good night, a slow night had Dick been back in Nixon. Dick was sure of it. “Nothing special,” he said. 

“You sleeping okay there?” Nix asked. 

“Not bad. Listen, is everything all right?” 

“Oh, sure. I just thought I’d give you a ring, make sure you hadn’t gone native on me.” 

Dick snorted. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“You know, decided to give it all up for the pastoral life.” 

Dick shifted from foot to foot. He felt as if Nix must know his thoughts somehow, though of course that was impossible. “For the hundredth time, they live in town. But it’s funny you should say,” he started. “I looked at a farm today.” 

Nix made a strange noise down the line, a choke or a cough, like he’d swallowed something down wrong. “To buy?” 

“When we shipped out I asked my dad to keep an eye on what came up for sale,” Dick said. “I was sending my pay back, so I figured if he saw something, you know. He had a couple of leads, so I went and poked around.” 

“Sounds nice. Thinking of filling it up with lots of little Winterses?” 

Dick took a breath. “Or one Nixon,” he said. 

Silence over the line. Then Nix laughed, more an expulsion of air than anything else, and certainly not enough emotion one way or another for Dick to decide he’d misstepped. He made a face anyway, and switched the receiver to the opposite hand to wipe his palm on his pajama bottoms. “So I’ll see you at Harry’s,” he said. 

Nix seized immediately on the change of subject. “Yeah. Blanche took me to Tiffany; you’ll be pleased to know the happy couple are about to be the owners of a lovely sterling silver serving tray. Engraved, even, if they get it back to me in time.” 

“Good,” Dick said. “Thanks for taking care of the gift. It wasn’t too much? Well, nevermind, I’ll get you my half as soon as I can.” 

“‘Course you will,” Nix said. “Anyway, I guess we’re on the clock, huh?” 

“What?” 

“The phone call.” 

“Oh,” Dick said. “Yeah, there’s supposed to be a five minute limit. But it’s late. They’ll just pick up if they need the line.” 

“I ought to be going soon anyway,” Nix said. “Work in the morning.” 

“Right,” Dick said. “Need a wakeup call?” 

“I’ve got an alarm clock, thanks.” 

“Just checking.” 

Dick pressed his lips together. Say something, he thought, but it was late and he was far away. If they’d been together he thought he could have made Nix understand, but now on the telephone words seemed to desert him, as if Nix’s acknowledgement of the time had swept his brain as clean of language as the farmhouse porch. 

“I’ll see you Friday then,” said Nix. “I, uh, booked us in for a double at the hotel.” 

“How thrifty of you,” Dick said dryly. 

“Well, you know me, always pinching pennies.” 

Nix yawned, which set Dick off, and he was bolstered somehow by the idea that even miles apart Nix could set some deep and primitive corner of his brain alight. 

“It’s past your bedtime,” Nix said. “Get the hell off the phone, why don’t you.” 

Dick ran a hand over his face. “Goodnight, Nix.” 

“Night.” 

Dick hung on the line until he heard the click of the receiver. Then he set his own back into its cradle and crept back up the stairs. He lay in the dark and thought about Nix, and how back at the start he’d never thought to be so broken up about anything. It was that farmhouse, he decided; there was something about painting a sunny picture of something you couldn’t have, bootstraps and elbow grease be damned. Don’t waste your time, he said to himself. Don’t moon over it. Waste tonight if you want to; it’s not good for much else. And then wake up tomorrow and get on with things. 

***

Dick’s train got into Wilkes-Barre on Friday afternoon, and he took a taxi to the hotel. He came upon Nix in the hotel bar, posted up at a table with Harry and Carwood Lipton, the three of them clearly knee-deep already. The tabletop was cluttered with beer bottles, and when Harry saw Dick he leapt up with enough force to topple half of them like bowling pins. 

“Dick Winters,” he said. “Man of the hour.” 

“I thought that was you, Harry,” Dick said.

“Aw, get over here.” 

Harry hugged him. Dick caught Nix’s eye over Harry’s shoulder and grinned. Nix’s look was warm, and Lipton glanced back and forth between them, looking satisfied. Harry stepped back, keeping a hand on Dick’s shoulder by which he guided him to the table. 

“All right, all right, make some room. Clear these bottles off. Jesus Christ, Lewis, were you raised in a barn?” 

“Nah, that was me,” Dick said. “Lew hasn’t got an excuse.” He held out a hand to Lipton. “Hello, Carwood.”

“Hello, sir.” 

Nix flicked a bottle cap at Lipton. “You stop that right now,” he said. “We’ve been through this, goddammit, and he’s too polite not to let you sir him all day long.” 

“I am not,” Dick said. “It’s Dick,” he said pointedly to Lipton, who laughed. 

“Understood,” Lipton said. “Good to see you, Dick.” 

Dick pulled up a chair between Lipton and Harry. He stretched his legs out under the frame, feet coming to rest between both of Nix’s. “Yeah, you too. So what’s this, Harry, your bride-to-be does all the work while you kick back with these two?” 

“Don’t get him started again,” Nix said. “He only just stopped moaning about how exhausted he is. Apparently weddings are a lot of work.” 

“Not that you’d know, right?” Harry said.

“Funnily enough, my input wasn’t overly solicited,” Nix said. 

“Well, I’ve spent the last three days helping Kitty and her sisters make flowers out of crepe paper because she got it into her head to make decorations for the reception at the last minute. Apparently she saw something in a magazine and decided she could do it for a quarter of the price. I’ve got blisters, guys. Look at this mess.” 

He held out his hands; sure enough, he had a plaster on each. 

“Regular walking wounded,” Dick said. “You sure you’ll make it down the aisle?” 

Lipton looked impressed. “Resourceful of her. Say, she end up using your reserve chute for a dress after all?” 

Harry colored. “You know about that?” 

“Everyone knows about that,” Nix said. “What can I say, Harry, I was moved.” 

“You’re something else,” Harry said. He looked at Dick. “How do you manage living with this guy?” 

“Oh, I get by, I suppose.” 

“Well, I’m sure as a housemate he’s got nothing on me.” Harry took a sip of his beer and raised an eyebrow at Nix. 

“What’s the joke?” Lipton asked. 

“Oh, Dick and Harry billeted together at Aldbourne,” Nix said airily. “Apparently it represents the peak of young Mr. Welsh’s life, because he can’t stop talking about it lo these many years later.” 

“You’re just jealous we had three squares a day and high tea to boot,” Harry said. “It was for the best, anyway. Mrs. Barnes would never have put up with your carousing.” 

“Carousing,” Nix said, shaking his head. “Libel and slander, Lip.” 

“I don’t know,” Lipton said. “I was at more than one poker night. I believe those might have fallen under the definition.” 

Nix kicked Dick under the table. “C’mon, throw me a rope here,” he said. 

“You know,” said Dick, “I’m feeling a little parched after the train ride. Think I’ll go and get a Coke.” He got up from the table, and it was all he could do not to wink at Nix across it. “Anyone want another?” 

“Goddammit,” Nix said. “I’m coming with you.” 

“Can’t take the heat, Nix? Dick, get me one more, would you? Then I’ve got to get home and finish off those damn paper flowers. I swear, if all of you don’t tell Kitty they’re the prettiest things you ever saw--” 

“You’re a good man, Harry,” Dick said, and meant it. 

Nix jostled the table as he rose, knocking over another empty bottle as if to punctuate the movement. Dick laughed at him, crossed his arms over his chest and waited for him to get clear of the table. 

“Hi,” Dick said as they turned away together. 

“Hi yourself. Trip okay?” 

“Sure,” Dick said. “How’s my car?” 

“Home in the drive,” Nix said. “That thing handles like a tugboat. I borrowed one of Dad’s. Say, I had an idea for after--” 

The bartender interrupted then, sliding two napkins in front of them. When they’d ordered, Dick leaned one elbow on the bar, turned the rest of his body to face Nix. He was wearing a pale grey suit; the weather was warm, and he’d tugged his tie a little looser, unbuttoned the top button of his shirt as the beer had by turns cooled him off and warmed him back up again. His hat was off, abandoned to the back of his chair, and his hair was mussed. Dick badly wanted to sweep it off his brow. He picked up the napkin instead and began to fold it into quarters. 

“What were we talking about?” Nix asked. 

“Your idea,” Dick prompted. 

It occurred to him that between the two of them they seemed to have quite a few ideas, the greatest of which was the root cause of his twitchy fingers, of the way he felt half mad with joy from twenty minutes’ conversation across the table. 

“Oh,” said Nix. “Better save it for later.” He smiled the way he had when he wanted Dick to guess their port of call on the train to New York way back when. He liked to have a secret, did Nix, but the fact was he liked to tell one even more. 

From across the room came the bark of Harry’s laugh. “It’s good to see them,” Dick said, nodding at the table. 

“Yeah, it is,” said Nix. “Speirs’ll be here tonight, Lip said. So it’ll be a real officer’s reunion.” 

“He invite anyone else?” 

“Buck, I think, but he couldn’t get away. None of the other guys. Something tells me Kitty had quite the guest list on her side to accomodate. But they’re well liked in town, you know. No shortage of mutual friends. Harry’s probably brawled with half of them.” 

“That’s Harry. Bash your teeth in and then buy you a round the next night, isn’t that right?” 

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t go in for fighting.” 

“That’s true,” Dick said. “That’s about the only variety of carousing you didn’t indulge in over in England.” A tall bottle of Coca-Cola appeared at his elbow, along with Harry’s beer. He slid his billfold from his pocket and paid the bartender, jerking his head at the beer in front of Nix. “His too.” 

He expected Nix to grumble about it, but he didn’t. He picked his beer up and clinked its neck against Dick’s Coke. “Well, cheers to this,” Nix said. “It’s, uh. It’s good to have you back.” 

“I was only gone a week,” Dick said. 

“Right,” said Nix. “Just a week.” He looked down at the label of his beer, inspecting it as if something about it was different from the last three or four. “We should get back over there,” he said. 

Back at the table Lipton and Harry were deep in conversation about Wilkes-Barre night life, and had apparently made plans to meet later, after Harry had fulfilled the last of his obligations. “Hotel restaurant’s not bad if you all want to get a bite,” he said. “I’ve got dinner with Kitty’s family, but I can come and find you afterwards.” 

“Wouldn’t want you hung over on your wedding day,” Lipton said earnestly. 

“That ship’s sailed,” Nix said. 

“I want to see Ron,” Harry said, ignoring him. “Besides, my best man’ll drag me out anyway. We’ll stop in here and meet you, say ten o’clock?”

“Sounds fine,” Lipton said. “Boys?” 

“Great,” said Dick. 

Nix was watching him from across the table. “Yeah, great,” he echoed. He took a long drink of his beer. 

“I think I’m going to go up to the room,” Dick said. “Drop my bags, take a shower.” 

“I’d better take you up and show you where it is,” said Nix.

Harry rolled his eyes. “These hotel floor plans are pretty tricky.” 

Nix got back up, set his hat on his head and glowered at Harry. “Shouldn’t you be making some flowers about now? Lip, you can see him off, right? When’s Ron getting in?” 

“He said he’d be on the six o’clock train,” said Lipton. “You two wanna have dinner at seven or so? I’ll come and knock on the door.” 

“Don’t worry about it,” Dick said. “We’ll meet you down here.” The words slipped out without much thought, and afterwards Dick wondered if he’d been too obvious. But Lipton seemed preoccupied, and Harry was soused, and Nix was shifting from foot to foot as if he wanted to be upstairs as badly as Dick did, so on balance Dick decided the risk had probably been worth it. 

“Good thinking,” Nix muttered in the elevator. “Meeting them downstairs.” 

“Mmm.” They were still a perfectly appropriate distance apart. The elevator operator had his back to them, head bowed and a newspaper folded on his lap, but even so. Nix took his hat off, put it on, took it off again. Dick watched the floors light up one by one. They were on the fifth, and when the car glided to a stop Nix produced a tip for the operator with alacrity and stepped out into the hallway, gesturing for Dick to follow. 

“We’re just down on the end here,” Nix said, as if he needed to make good on his excuse for coming up together. 

He unlocked the door and led Dick inside. Dick shut the door behind them and dropped his bag. Nix took his hat off once and for all and tossed it onto the bed, and they looked at each other as if waiting for the starter’s pistol. Maybe it was the conversation downstairs; maybe it was the torturous brevity of the phone. They’d been separated for far longer than a week and it hadn’t made Dick feel like this, but then he hadn’t been quite so used to Nix’s presence as the way he’d come to be in New Jersey. At home, he amended. For that was the crux of things, wasn’t it? That was why the farmhouse had unsettled him so. When you’re ready, his father had said. He didn’t know when he’d be ready for a home without Nix in it. 

“Dick?” Nix spoke, brow furrowed, and that was signal enough. 

He crossed the space between them in a stride or two and crashed softly against Nix, hands inside his suit jacket on either side of his waist, mouth at his jaw. He pawed at the fabric until Nix caught his meaning, shrugged the jacket off, laughing. 

“Only a week, huh?” 

“Oh, shut up,” Dick said. 

They kissed, sweet at first and slow, the initial burst of proximity enough to encourage patience now that that first requirement had been met. They kicked their shoes off and Dick dispensed with his own jacket, and then they sat down on one of the double beds. 

“Did you bring my good suit?” Dick asked. 

“Of course. You can wrinkle this one with impunity. I can tear it off you, if you want.” 

“I’ll pass,” Dick said. “But I appreciate the offer.” He loosened his tie with one hand, palmed Nix’s cheek with the other. He’d thought of Nix’s mouth sometimes, sitting up in his room at night. He told Nix so and watched him blush. 

“You think of anything else?” Nix asked. 

“Oh, this and that.” 

Nix shook his head; his next kiss had teeth in it. “You’re a tease.” 

They moved slower still once they’d undressed. Dick had his fingers in Nix’s hair the way he’d wanted to downstairs. The room was stuffy and they didn’t dare open the window; in no time at all they were both sticky with sweat. 

“I sprang for a private bath,” Nix said. “If you’d rather kill two birds with one stone.” 

Another day Dick might have hassled him for his profligacy, but now he’d be hard pressed to think of a better allocation of funds. He kissed Nix again, sliding off of the bed as he did so. When they parted Nix’s eyes were still closed, his lips ludicrously pink, his face yet free even of the care required to walk into the bathroom. He looked, for just a moment, as if he were asleep and having an especially nice dream. He was beautiful, and Dick thought so without shame or self-consciousness. 

In the shower he let Nix lead, take the cake of soap and run it over his chest. He leaned back against the tile, the cold thrilling against his skin. He closed his eyes as Nix washed him,  
as he forgot himself and stopped washing altogether, the slip of water and lather and flesh. 

“This is nice,” Dick said. 

“Huh,” said Nix. “If that’s all it is, I’m losing my touch.” 

“I meant--you know what I meant.” 

Nix moved in closer, his body flush with Dick’s, a warm and solid plank to counter the coolness of the shower wall. Dick put one hand on his chest, an anchor. He put his other hand over Nix’s where it moved between them, his touch still a little loose and aimless where he held them both.

“I know what you meant,” Nix said. 

Dick kissed him again. Clean water ran down into their mouths, their noses, until breathing through it needed too much thought and Dick pulled back and laid the side of his head against the wall out of the spray. Nix’s mouth found his neck. 

“Careful,” Dick said, and Nix made an irritated noise in reply. 

“Let ‘em see,” he said. “Let ‘em look me in the eye and ask me about it.” 

“You aren’t serious.” 

“The hell I’m not.” 

But when he set to again it was well below Dick’s collarbone, out of sight under clothes, and though the sensation should have been the same Dick couldn’t help but feel as though something was missing now, some frisson. He shut his eyes again and thought about it, going out with a bruise sucked into his neck, one you could see with the shift of his collar. 

“I’d like it,” he said. “Lew. I’d like it.” 

Nix cursed softly, let Dick bat his hand away and take him over so they each had hold of the other. It was good this way. By now Dick knew Nix’s preferences and physical eccentricities as an extension of his own; he liked to watch Nix’s face when they were together, when Dick moved in a way Nix hadn’t expected, like a student overperforming on a test. 

“Tell me,” Nix said. He was close, the hitch in his voice betraying him. 

All at once Dick remembered Nix in the foxhole in Bastogne, that boundless night when everything started. I just wanted to feel good, he’d said. 

 

Dick swallowed. “It feels good. If--if people knew we were here like this, that you could make me feel like this--” 

“Jesus Christ,” Nix said. “Dick.” 

Warmth on his hand hotter than the shower spray, and Dick threw his other arm around Nix’s shoulders and kissed him hard, the feel of his tongue in Nix’s mouth enough to finish him, the intimacy of the act just shy of painful. That people could trust this soft and essential part to a set of teeth, he thought. That they could do it instead of saying _love_.

He set his forehead on Nix’s shoulder. Nix’s hand came to rest of the nape of Dick’s neck, his thumb running back and forth with incremental slowness like a clock winding down. They were both breathing hard; every now and then the mood would strike Dick and he’d huff out a laugh that set Nix off too. 

Eventually they slid to the bottom of the bathtub together, a pale tangle of limbs, hair plastered to their skulls like seaweed. The water ran cold by now, and Dick had forgotten he’d ever been sweaty. He felt suddenly ridiculous, and he grinned at Nix, who looked it.

When the novelty wore off they clambered to their feet together, gripping each other by the arms and trying not to slip. “I’m freezing,” Dick said. “Pass me a towel, huh?” 

In the bedroom Dick dressed quickly. He leaned against the wall and watched as Nix did the same at a more leisurely pace, at last sitting on the bed again to put on his socks. He looked up and caught Dick’s eye.

“You know, you could try to look a little less like we just brought each other off in the shower.”

Dick shrugged. He felt satisfied. He squinted at Nix like a cat in sun might crack one eye open.“You were singing a different tune a minute ago. You were ready to shout it from the rooftops.” 

Nix shook his head, ducking down to retrieve a shoe that had already managed to work its way under the bed. “I just get pissed off sometimes,” he said, his voice muffled.

“Huh?”

“You ever get pissed off, Dick?” 

“About what?” 

Nix sat up, frowning, and waved his hand between them. “Best thing in my whole life and I can’t say a goddamn thing about it to anyone.” 

Dick swallowed, the disclosure washing over him like a tonic. “And would you? If you could? I know what you said in there, but--”

“Nobody’d ever believe it, anyway. Dissolute guy like me?” 

“I’m being serious.” Dick sighed, coming over to sit beside Nix on the bed. “Ann asked me if I had a girl in New Jersey. I don’t wish I did. But it would’ve been nice to tell her I was happy.” 

“Happy,” said Nix. 

“Yes, happy. Don’t sound so damned surprised. I’ve been happy, Lew. I think I could keep being happy.” 

“What, forever? Now you’re just being sentimental.” 

“Well, we are at a wedding.”

He took Nix’s hand in his. He’d always liked Nix’s hands, the industry he saw in them, the way they seemed to quiver with latent energy. He looked at them now and saw them hovering over maps, drawing bold lines in wax pencil along miniature coastlines. He wished Nix could find something else to handle so deftly. 

“I know what I do,” Nix said. “I know what you think about it.” 

“It’s fine,” Dick said. 

It was the sort of problem that slipped in like a shard of glass, so sharp it didn’t hurt at first, might not hurt for years. Oh, it would hurt, to be sure, but Dick wasn’t yet thirty and he still carried with him a vestigial sheen of youthful immortality. They’d lived through combat, he told himself. Surely nothing that fit in a bottle could fell them now. 

***

They met Speirs and Lipton for dinner in the hotel restaurant, an Eastern Pennsylvania mock-up of the Waldorf. Walking into the dining room Dick could imagine a future version of himself who’d find the half-hearted likeness embarrassing the way he suspected Nix did, and he was both disquieted and oddly touched by the implication of long years of influence. 

They had a perfectly serviceable meal of steak and salad. Nix and Lipton ordered baked Alaska for dessert; Dick and Speirs had coffee, and they shared a look across the table that communicated a kind of exasperated indulgence at the others that made Dick wonder just how much Lipton and Speirs saw of one another. 

“Not sick of the Army yet?” Nix said to Speirs, earning him a flat look that indicated Speirs couldn’t imagine it and couldn’t imagine anyone else doing so either. 

After dinner they found an exuberant Harry, best man and local crowd in tow. 

“You oughta see him,” said the best man. “Look he gets on his face. All ‘yes, Kitty’ and ‘no, Kitty’ and ‘of course I’ll go and fetch you some more crepe, Kitty.’ Boy oh boy, you oughta see it.”

“Fuck off, Pete,” said Harry, propped up on the bar by an elbow. 

Pete was a burly linebacker type who looked as if he could heft Harry overhead with one hand. He had a ready grin and Dick thought he seemed all right. Nix had disliked him instantly. 

“Aw.” Pete clapped Harry on the back. “It’s damned sweet, is what it is.” He raised an empty glass. “And now you gentlemen know I’m really in the weeds. To Harry,” he said. 

“To Harry!” 

Harry lay his head down on the bar and groaned. Nix turned back to the table they sat at beside Lipton and Speirs and rolled his eyes theatrically. 

“You too world-weary for all this, Lew?” Dick asked. 

Lipton laughed, nose in his drink.

“Don’t you two start,” Nix said. 

***

Four o’clock the following afternoon saw Harry and Kitty joined in holy matrimony in a church filled with flowers, big boughs of cherry blossoms and pink roses like Valentine candy. Harry was handsome in his suit, and Dick didn’t know from dresses but he was sure Kitty’s was top of the heap. He told her so in the receiving line at the reception hall, and she flew into his arms the way Blanche Nixon had, as though they were old friends. 

“Oh, Dick,” she said, tears glassy on her cheeks.“Thank you for bringing him back to me.” 

He put his hands on her back; the egg-white silk clung, and he thought if he shut his eyes and listened he would hear the snap of the chute, feel the jerk of the crosswind. She stepped back, ready to accept Nix’s congratulations, and he found he had to look away a moment, shake his head free of the sense memory. 

“Dick goddamn Winters,” said Harry, as though he hadn’t seen Dick just yesterday and into the wee hours of the morning besides. He hauled Dick into half an embrace, spoke conspiratorially into his ear at a volume suggesting a man already several flutes deep into a bottle of champagne. Dick might have been concerned had he been anyone but Harry, and had his expression had been any less than deliriously happy. 

“I’ve got a question for you,” Harry said. 

“All right,” Dick said, raising an eyebrow. 

“You got a girl, Dick?” 

He was suddenly all too aware of Nix at his elbow. “Harry--”

“Because look, I’ve got a brand new sister-in-law--that one in the blue just there, that’s her. Gimme just a minute and I’ll take you over, she’s real nice.” 

“You know, Harry, as much as I appreciate the thought--” 

“What’m I, chopped liver?” Nix said, muscling into the exchange.

“Nix,” said Harry, wheeling on him now, taking him by both lapels. “Not you, Nix. You know I love you, buddy. But no.” He patted Nix on the cheek. 

“Dick, this man is talking nonsense and is clearly in dire need of more champagne. Let’s go take care of that, shall we?” 

Harry groaned. “Aw, don’t be like that, Lewis.” 

“Like what? The feeling’s mutual, pal, if that’s what you’re worried about. I can take a knife or two so long as it’s in the front. But hey, you just got hitched, and you’ve got a hundred of your second-closest friends here, would you look at that.”

He disentangled himself from Harry and shoved him gently in the direction of Kitty and the next well-wisher. Harry, bemused and inebriated, allowed himself to be shoved. Nix took hold of Dick’s sleeve and steered him out of the receiving line in the direction of the bar. 

“Are we really getting him more champagne?” Dick asked. 

Nix waved a dismissive hand. “Someone will,” he said. “Doesn’t have to be us. I don’t know what it is about married people. It’s as if they’ve got a disease they can’t help spreading.” 

“I suppose you were never like that.” 

“I’m not one of them,” Nix said. “I just strayed into their kingdom under enchantment. Thank god the queen came to her senses and cast me out, huh?” 

Dick didn’t know that Nix thought about what he said half the time, about how Dick might take it. But he supposed it was no different from his asking after Kathy back in Austria, or the knee-jerk idea that something very wrong had happened the day Nix folded Betsy into her mother’s car asleep and went back inside the house alone. But they were off-script, Nix and he, and sometimes they spoke old lines as though prompted from alongside the stage. 

“You know, it strikes me as impolite to go around trashing the institution of marriage at a wedding,” Dick said. 

“You’re right,” said Nix. “Seems like something a man might do if he were bitter.” 

They’d found the bar, where a serious-looking waiter was pouring champagne. Nix took a glass and necked it, gave the waiter his empty and took another. “For the road,” he said. “You want?” 

Dick shook his head. 

There was dinner (“A buffet, thank God,” said Nix) and there was cake, and then there was dancing. Not to be deterred, Harry dragged Dick before Kitty’s sister just as the band struck up a slow song. She was a nice girl, as pretty as the new Mrs. Welsh, and she accepted Dick’s invitation to dance in the same spirit of good-natured amusement at Harry as Dick had made it. Relieved, he led her out onto the floor. Her bridesmaid’s dress was blue silk, though the texture beneath his fingers somehow avoided recalling parachutes. He was grateful for it, and for the pleasant stream of chatter she kept up in his ear, though by the middle of the song she went quiet and heavy in his arms as though lulled. 

Over her shoulder he could see Nix dancing too, with a girl Dick vaguely recalled as one of Kitty’s friends. She was telling him something, whatever it was putting a pleased look on his face. Dick was reminded of the way Nix lit up sometimes when he talked to a woman: no surprise, because he was good at it, because Nix liked a party and this was a party. 

The lights were low. The song ended, but on the floor the dancers were comfortable; they sighed and shifted until the band eased into another slow number. 

“What a lovely wedding,” murmured Kitty’s sister. She laid her cheek against Dick’s chest. Her hair smelled nice. The singer’s voice stretched like taffy over an underlying tremolo. _I’m getting sentimental over you._

“Yeah,” Dick said. “It is.” 

Across the room Nix had his dance partner’s head on his own shoulder. He was watching Dick. He didn’t quite smile, but he looked as though he was thinking about it.

***

They drifted home from the reception together, afloat on the late hour. For once Nix played at being drunker than he really was, one arm slung across Dick’s shoulders, leaning in. 

“Anyone looks, I’m just a hopeless sot,” he’d said, breath sultry at Dick’s ear. 

“Lew, you’re that and so much more.” 

Nix laughed, his whole body shaking, and Dick hauled him closer as though he really was stumbling, and because the street was deserted and he felt as if he might as well be drunk himself he took Nix by the hand and danced him into the shadows between the streetlights. 

In bed they were slow and uncareful, Dick laid out over Nix’s back. Their rhythm was halfhearted, sleep dragging at them both, a snug sort of togetherness in which the endgame was beside the point. 

“There are places we could go,” Nix said. “Places a couple of guys can go together.” 

“I know,” Dick said. 

“They’ve got ‘em in Chicago.” 

“I imagine they do.” 

“I’d make you dance with me.” 

“Okay.” 

Nix rolled over onto his back. Dick was temporarily dislodged, but he settled back against Nix’s body again undaunted. He was hot; their skin stuck together where their bodies overlapped and his hair was dark and curling with sweat, but he wouldn’t move, not now. 

“That was my idea,” Nix said. 

“Dancing?” 

“Chicago,” said Nix. He took a breath; Dick’s head on his chest rose and fell like a wave. “What do you say we drive the car straight back to the city tomorrow, drop it at my dad’s and hop a train? We could stay a week or so, see the sights.” 

“What about--” 

“Work’s fine,” Nix said. “Hatches are all battened down, if you can believe it, and as it happens the place didn’t actually fall down around my ears without you there. Besides, you’ve got a special dispensation from the boss.” 

“Mmm. If we’re not careful people will think something untoward is going on,” Dick said. Emboldened, he ran his hand along the inside of Nix’s thigh. 

“Innuendo from the likes of you,” Nix said. “Never thought I’d see the day.” 

“I’ve changed, Nix. Met this guy in the army. Fell in love, lost all my morals. You know how it goes.” 

Nix must have known, because he gave a feral exclamation somewhere between joy and outrage. He rolled atop Dick and pinned him to the bed, and Dick’s hands flew to his hips on impulse. He closed his eyes, gasping when Nix rolled his body against Dick’s, when it became clear he had abandoned their earlier inertia. Dick felt like laughing, knew that when he opened his eyes he’d see Nix there, hair a messy impasto, face stubbled already the way he would see him every night and every ensuing morning, fifty years of mornings in a big bedroom with a shade tree outside the window. He’d get on Nix to shave and Nix would say, you making an inspection, Major? or roll over and rub his rough cheek violently against Dick’s and say I dunno what you’re talking about, Dick, I really don’t. 

Tonight when they finished they would sleep badly, tangled together in the stifling dark, and tomorrow on the train Dick would lay his head against the window and watch the light streak red behind his eyelids until he fell asleep. He’d wake up somewhere in Ohio, Nix beside him reading a book, the train streaming west to chase the sun.


End file.
